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REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD 
AND YOUTH 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 

NEW YORK • BOSTON • CHICAGO • DALLAS 
ATLANTA • SAN FRANCISCO 

MACMILLAN & CO., Limited 

LONDON • BOMBAY • CALCUTTA 
MELBOURNE 

THE MACMILLAN CO. OF CANADA, Ltd. 

TORONTO 






The picture " Memory Harbour " is the village of Rosses Point, but 
with the distances shortened and the houses run together as in an old- 
fashioned panoramic map. The man on the pedestal in the middle of 
the river is " the metal man," and he points to where the water is deep 
enough for ships. The coffin, crossbones, skull, and loaf at the point 
of the headland are to remind one of the sailor who was buried there 
by a ship's crew in a hurry not to miss the tide. As they were not sure 
if he was really dead they buried with him a loaf, as the story runs. 

W. B. Y. 



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nsrtt baiiud 2fi rtt 'lo ano bnirnai'i oil eiB bnelbBari arit !o 

3tu8 Jon g-rav/ yariJ ^A . jbil sri* zgim oJ Jon ynuri & ni w3to g'qirfe s yd 
.2nui yioia irt1 ?,b ~\t\ol s mrrl riJiw biinjd y3ffi bsab y" b91 g 8 w 3rt" ^i 

y a w 



REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND 
YOUTH BY WILLIAM BUTLER YEATS 



THE MACMILLAN COMPANY 
NEW YORK MCMXVI 






Copyright, 1916, 
Bv THE MACMILLAN COMPANY. 

Set up and electrotyped. Published March, 1916. 



Norfaooo $«BS 
J. 8. Cushing Co. — Berwick & Smith Co. 

Norwood, Mass., U.S.A. 



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APR 27 1916 
©CLA427847 



To those few people mainly personal friends who 
have read all that I have written. 

W. B. Y. 



PREFACE 

Sometimes when I remember a relative that I 
have been fond of, or a strange incident of the 
past, I wander here and there till I have some- 
body to talk to. Presently I notice that my lis- 
tener is bored ; but now that I have written it out, 
I may even begin to forget it all. In any case, 
because one can always close a book, my friend 
need not be bored. 

I have changed nothing to my knowledge, and yet 
it must be that I have changed many things with- 
out my knowledge, for I am writing after so many 
years, and have consulted neither friend nor letter 
nor old newspaper and describe what comes often- 
est into my memory. 

I say this fearing that some surviving friend of 
my youth may remember something in a different 
shape and be offended with my book. 

Christmas Day, 1914. 



vn 




REVERIES OVER CHILDHOOD AND 
YOUTH 

Y first memories are fragmentary 
and isolated and contemporaneous, 
as though one remembered vaguely- 
some early day of the Seven Days. 
It seems as if time had not yet been 
created, for all are connected with emotion and 
place and without sequence. 

I remember sitting upon somebody's knee, looking 
out of a window at a wall covered with cracked and 
falling plaster, but what wall I do not remember, 
and being told that some relation once lived there. 
I am looking out of another window in London. It 
is at Fitzroy Road. Some boys are playing in the 
road and among them a boy in uniform, a telegraph 
boy perhaps. When I ask who the boy is, a servant 
tells me that he is going to blow the town up, and I 
go to sleep in terror. 

After that come memories of Sligo, where I live 
with my grandparents. I am sitting on the ground 
looking at a mastless toy boat, with the paint rubbed 
and scratched, and I say to myself in great melan- 
choly, "it is further away than it used to be," and 
while I am saying it I am looking at a long scratch 
in the stern, for it is especially the scratch which is 

B 1 



further away. Then one day at dinner my great- 
uncle William Middleton says, "we should not 
make light of the troubles of children. They are 
worse than ours, because we can see the end of our 
trouble and they can never see any end," and I feel 
grateful for I know that I am very unhappy and 
have often said to myself, "when you grow up, 
never talk as grown-up people do of the happiness 
of childhood." I may have already had the night of 
misery when, having prayed for several days that I 
might die, I had begun to be afraid that I was dying 
and prayed that I might live. There was no reason 
for my unhappiness. Nobody was unkind, and my 
grandmother has still after so many years my grati- 
tude and my reverence. The house was so big 
that there was always a room to hide in, and I had 
a red pony and a garden where I could wander, and 
there were two dogs to follow at my heels, one white 
with some black spots on his head and the other 
with long black hair all over him. I used to think 
about God and fancy that I was very wicked, and 
one day when I threw a stone and hit a duck in the 
yard by mischance and broke its wing, I was full of 
wonder when I was told that the duck would be 
cooked for dinner and that I should not be pun- 
ished. 

Some of my misery was loneliness and some of it 

2 



fear of old William Pollexfen my grandfather. He 
was never unkind, and I cannot remember that he 
ever spoke harshly to me, but it was the custom to 
fear and admire him. He had won the freedom of 
some Spanish city for saving life, but was so silent 
that his wife never knew it till he was near eighty, 
and then from the chance visit of some old sailor. 
She asked him if it was true and he said it was true, 
but she knew him too well to question and his old 
shipmate had left the town. She too had the habit 
of fear. We knew that he had been in many parts 
of the world, for there was a great scar on his hand 
made by a whaling-hook, and in the dining-room 
was a cabinet with bits of coral in it and a jar of 
water from the Jordan for the baptising of his chil- 
dren and Chinese pictures upon rice-paper and an 
ivory walking-stick from India that came to me 
after his death. He had great physical strength and 
had the reputation of never ordering a man to do 
anything he would not do himself. He owned many 
sailing ships and once, when a captain just come to 
anchor at Rosses Point reported something wrong 
with the rudder, had sent a messenger to say "send 
a man down to find out what's wrong." " The crew 
all refuse" was the answer. "Go down yourself" 
was my grandfather's order, and when that was not 
obeyed, he dived from the main deck, all the neigh- 

3 



bourhood lined along the pebbles of the shore. He 
came up with his skin torn but well informed about 
the rudder. He had a violent temper and kept a 
hatchet at his bedside for burglars and would knock 
a man down instead of going to law, and I once saw 
him hunt a group of men with a horsewhip. He 
had no relation for he was an only child, and being 
solitary and silent, he had few friends. He corre- 
sponded with Campbell of Islay who had befriended 
him and his crew after a shipwreck, and Captain 
Webb, the first man who had swum the Channel 
and who was drowned swimming the Niagara 
Rapids, had been a mate in his employ and became 
a close friend. That is all the friends I can remem- 
ber and yet he was so looked up to and admired 
that when he returned from taking the waters at 
Bath his men would light bonfires along the railway 
line for miles, while his partner William Middleton 
whose father after the great famine had attended 
the sick for weeks, and taken cholera from a man he 
carried in his arms into his own house and died of it, 
and was himself civil to everybody and a cleverer 
man than my grandfather, came and went without 
notice. I think I confused my grandfather with 
God, for I remember in one of my attacks of melan- 
choly praying that he might punish me for my sins, 
and I was shocked and astonished when a dar- 

4 



ing little girl — a cousin I think — having waited 
under a group of trees in the avenue, where she 
knew he would pass near four o'clock on the way to 
his dinner, said to him, "if I were you and you were 
a little girl, I would give you a doll." 
Yet for all my admiration and alarm, neither I nor 
anyone else thought it wrong to outwit his violence 
or his rigour ; and his lack of suspicion and a certain 
helplessness made that easy while it stirred our af- 
fection. When I must have been still a very little 
boy, seven or eight years old perhaps, an uncle 
called me out of bed one night, to ride the five 
or six miles to Rosses Point to borrow a railway- 
pass from a cousin. My grandfather had one, but 
thought it dishonest to let another use it, but the 
cousin was not so particular. I was let out through 
a gate that opened upon a little lane beside the gar- 
den away from ear-shot of the house, and rode 
delighted through the moonlight, and awoke my 
cousin in the small hours by tapping on his window 
with a whip. I was home again by two or three in 
the morning and found the coachman waiting in the 
little lane. My grandfather would not have thought 
such an adventure possible, for every night at eight 
he believed that the stable-yard was locked, and he 
knew that he was brought the key. Some servant 
had once got into trouble at night and so he had 

5 



arranged that they should all be locked in. He 
never knew, what everybody else in the house knew, 
that for all the ceremonious bringing of the key 
the gate was never locked. 

Even to-day when I read " King Lear" his image is 
always before me and I often wonder if the delight 
in passionate men in my plays and in my poetry 
is more than his memory. He must have been ig- 
norant, though I could not judge him in my child- 
hood, for he had run away to sea when a boy, " gone 
to sea through the hawse-hole" as he phrased it, 
and I can but remember him with two books — his 
Bible and Falconer's "Shipwreck," a little green- 
covered book that lay always upon his table ; he be- 
longed to some younger branch of an old Cornish 
family. His father had been in the Army, had re- 
tired to become an owner of sailing ships, and an en- 
graving of some old family place my grandfather 
thought should have been his hung next a painted 
coat of arms in the little back parlour. His mother 
had been a Wexford woman, and there was a tradi- 
tion that his family had been linked with Ireland 
for generations and once had their share in the old 
Spanish trade with Gal way. He had a good deal 
of pride and disliked his neighbours, whereas his 
wife, a Middleton, was gentle and patient and did 
many charities in the little back parlour among 

6 



frieze coats and shawled heads, and every night 
when she saw him asleep went the round of the 
house alone with a candle to make certain there was 
no burglar in danger of the hatchet. She was a true 
lover of her garden and before the care of her house 
had grown upon her, would choose some favourite 
among her flowers and copy it upon rice-paper. I 
saw some of her handiwork the other day and I 
wondered at the delicacy of form and colour and at 
a handling that may have needed a magnifying 
glass it was so minute. I can remember no other 
pictures but the Chinese paintings, and some 
coloured prints of battles in the Crimea upon the 
wall of a passage, and the painting of a ship at 
the passage end darkened by time. 
My grown-up uncles and aunts, my grandfather's 
many sons and daughters, came and went, and al- 
most all they said or did has faded from my mem- 
ory, except a few harsh words that convince me 
by a vividness out of proportion to their harshness 
that all were habitually kind and considerate. The 
youngest of my uncles was stout and humorous and 
had a tongue of leather over the keyhole of his 
door to keep the draught out, and another whose 
bedroom was at the end of a long stone passage had 
a model turret ship in a glass case. He was a clever 
man and had designed the Sligo quays, but was now 

7 



going mad and inventing a vessel of war that could 
not be sunk, his pamphlet explained, because of a 
hull of solid wood. Only six months ago my sister 
awoke dreaming that she held a wingless sea-bird 
in her arms and presently she heard that he had 
died in his mad-house, for a sea-bird is the omen 
that announces the death or danger of a Pollexfen. 
An uncle, George Pollexfen, afterwards astrologer 
and mystic, and my dear friend, came but seldom 
from Ballina, once to a race meeting with two pos- 
tillions dressed in green; and there was that 
younger uncle who had sent me for the railway- 
pass. He was my grandmother's favourite, and 
had, the servants told me, been sent away from 
school for taking a crowbar to a bully. 
I can only remember my grandmother punishing 
me once. I was playing in the kitchen and a servant 
in horseplay pulled my shirt out of my trousers in 
front just as my grandmother came in and I, ac- 
cused of I knew not what childish indecency, was 
given my dinner in a room by myself. But I was al- 
ways afraid of my uncles and aunts, and once the 
uncle who had taken the crowbar to the bully found 
me eating lunch which my grandmother had given 
me and reproved me for it and made me ashamed. 
We breakfasted at nine and dined at four and it was 
considered self-indulgent to eat anything between 

8 



meals ; and once an aunt told me that I had reined 
in my pony and struck it at the same moment 
that I might show it off as I rode through the town, 
and I, because I had been accused of what I thought 
a very dark crime, had a night of misery. Indeed I 
remember little of childhood but its pain. I have 
grown happier with every year of life as though 
gradually conquering something in myself, for cer- 
tainly my miseries were not made by others but 
were a part of my own mind. 

II 

One day someone spoke to me of the voice of the 
conscience, and as I brooded over the phrase I came 
to think that my soul, because I did not hear an ar- 
ticulate voice, was lost. I had some wretched days 
until being alone with one of my aunts I heard a 
whisper in my ear, " what a tease you are ! " At first 
I thought my aunt must have spoken, but when I 
found she had not, I concluded it was the voice of 
my conscience and was happy again. From that 
day the voice has come to me at moments of crisis, 
but now it is a voice in my head that is sudden and 
startling. It does not tell me what to do, but often 
reproves me. It will say perhaps, "that is unjust" 
of some thought ; and once when I complained that 
a prayer had not been heard, it said, "you have 

9 



been helped." I had a little flagstaff in front of the 
house and a red flag with the Union Jack in the 
corner. Every night I pulled my flag down and 
folded it up and laid it on a shelf in my bedroom, 
and one morning before breakfast I found it, 
though I knew I had folded it up the night before, 
knotted round the bottom of the flagstaff so that it 
was touching the grass. I must have heard the ser- 
vants talking of the faeries for I concluded at once 
that a faery had tied those four knots and from that 
on believed that one had whispered in my ear. I 
have been told, though I do not remember it my- 
self, that I saw, whether once or many times I do 
not know, a supernatural bird in the corner of the 
room. Once too I was driving with my grand- 
mother a little after dark close to the Channel that 
runs for some five miles from Sligo to the sea, and 
my grandmother showed me the red light of an out- 
ward-bound steamer and told me that my grand- 
father was on board, and that night in my sleep I 
screamed out and described the steamer's wreck. 
The next morning my grandfather arrived on a 
blind horse found for him by grateful passengers. 
He had, as I remember the story, been asleep when 
the captain aroused him to say they were going on 
the rocks. He said, "have you tried sail on her?" 
and judging from some answer that the captain was 

10 



demoralised took over the command and, when the 
ship could not be saved, got the crew and passengers 
into the boats. His own boat was upset and he 
saved himself and some others by swimming ; some 
women had drifted ashore, buoyed up by their 
crinolines. " I was not so much afraid of the sea as 
of that terrible man with his oar," was the comment 
of a schoolmaster who was among the survivors. 
Eight men were, however, drowned and my grand- 
father suffered from that memory at intervals all 
his life, and if asked to read family prayers never 
read anything but the shipwreck of St. Paul. 
I remember the dogs more clearly than anyone ex- 
cept my grandfather and grandmother. The black 
hairy one had no tail because it had been sliced off, 
if I was told the truth, by a railway train. I think I 
followed at their heels more than they did at mine, 
and that their journeys ended at a rabbit-warren 
behind the garden ; and sometimes they had savage 
fights, the black hairy dog, being well protected by 
its hair, suffering least. I can remember one so sav- 
age that the white dog would not take his teeth out 
of the black dog's hair till the coachman hung them 
over the side of a water-butt, one outside and one in 
the water. My grandmother once told the coach- 
man to cut the hair like a lion's hair and, after a 
long consultation with the stable-boy, he cut it all 

11 



over the head and shoulders and left it on the lower 
part of the body. The dog disappeared for a few 
days and I did not doubt that its heart was broken. 
There was a large garden behind the house full of 
apple-trees with flower-beds and grass-plots in 
the centre and two figure-heads of ships, one among 
the strawberry plants under a wall covered with 
fruit trees and one among the flowers. The one 
among the flowers was a white lady in flowing robes, 
while the other, a stalwart man in uniform, had 
been taken from a three-masted ship of my grand- 
father's called "The Russia," and there was a 
belief among the servants that the stalwart man 
represented the Tsar and had been presented by the 
Tsar himself. The avenue, or as they say in Eng- 
land the drive, that went from the hall door through 
a clump of big trees to an insignificant gate and a 
road bordered by broken and dirty cottages, was 
but two or three hundred yards, and I often 
thought it should have been made to wind more, 
for I judged people's social importance mainly 
by the length of their avenues. This idea may have 
come from the stable-boy, for he was my principal 
friend. He had a book of Orange rhymes, and the 
days when we read them together in the hay-loft 
gave me the pleasure of rhyme for the first time. 
Later on I can remember being told, when there 

12 



was a rumour of a Fenian rising, that rifles had been 
served out to the Orangemen and presently, when I 
had begun to dream of my future life, I thought I 
would like to die fighting the Fenians. I was to 
build a very fast and beautiful ship and to have 
under my command a company of young men who 
were always to be in training like athletes and so 
become as brave and handsome as the young men 
in the story-books, and there was to be a big bat- 
tle on the sea-shore near Rosses and I was to be 
killed. I collected little pieces of wood and piled 
them up in a corner of the yard, and there was an 
old rotten log in a distant field I often went to 
look at because I thought it would go a long way 
in the making of the ship. All my dreams were of 
ships ; and one day a sea captain who had come 
to dine with my grandfather put a hand on each 
side of my head and lifted me up to show me Africa, 
and another day a sea captain pointed to the smoke 
from the Pern mill on the quays rising up beyond 
the trees of the lawn, as though it came from the 
mountain, and asked me if Ben Bulben was a 
burning mountain. 

Once every few months I used to go to Rosses Point 
or Ballisodare to see another little boy, who had a 
piebald pony that had once been in a circus and 
sometimes forgot where it was and went round 

13 



and round. He was George Middleton, son of my 
great-uncle William Middleton. Old Middleton had 
bought land, then believed a safe investment, at 
Ballisodare and at Rosses, and spent the winter at 
Ballisodare and the summer at Rosses. The Middle- 
ton and Pollexfen flour mills were at Ballisodare, 
and a great salmon weir, rapids and a waterfall, but 
it was more often at Rosses that I saw my cousin. 
We rowed in the river mouth or were taken sailing 
in a heavy slow schooner yacht or in a big ship's 
boat that had been rigged and decked. There were 
great cellars under the house, for it had been a 
smuggler's house a hundred years before, and some- 
times three loud raps would come upon the drawing 
room window at sun-down, setting all the dogs bark- 
ing, some dead smuggler giving his accustomed sig- 
nal. One night I heard them very distinctly and my 
cousins often heard them, and later on my sister. A 
pilot had told me that, after dreaming three times 
of a treasure buried in my uncle's garden, he had 
climbed the wall in the middle of the night and 
begun to dig but grew disheartened "because there 
was so much earth." I told somebody what he had 
said and was told that it was well he did not find it 
for it was guarded by a spirit that looked like a flat 
iron. At Ballisodare there was a cleft among the 
rocks that I passed with terror because I believed 

14 



that a murderous monster lived there that made a 
buzzing sound like a bee. 

It was through the Middletons perhaps that I got 
my interest in country stories and certainly the 
first faery stories that I heard were in the cottages 
about their houses. The Middletons took the near- 
est for friends and were always in and out of the 
cottages of pilots and of tenants. They were practi- 
cal, always doing something with their hands, mak- 
ing boats, feeding chickens, and without ambition. 
One of them had designed a steamer many years 
before my birth and long after I had grown to 
manhood one could hear it — it had some sort of 
obsolete engine — many miles off wheezing in the 
Channel like an asthmatic person. It had been 
built on the lake and dragged through the town by 
many horses, stopping before the windows where 
my mother was learning her lessons, and plunging 
the whole school into candle-light for five days, and 
was still patched and repatched mainly because it 
was believed to be a bringer of good luck. It had 
been called after the betrothed of its builder 
"Janet," long corrupted into the more familiar 
"Jennet," and the betrothed died in my youth hav- 
ing passed her eightieth year and been her hus- 
band's plague because of the violence of her temper. 
Another who was but a year or two older than 

15 



myself used to shock me by running after hens to 
know by their feel if they were on the point of drop- 
ping an egg. They let their houses decay and the 
glass fall from the windows of their greenhouses, 
but one among them at any rate had the second 
sight. They were liked but had not the pride and re- 
serve, the sense of decorum and order, the instinc- 
tive playing before themselves that belongs to those 
who strike the popular imagination. 
Sometimes my grandmother would bring me to see 
some old Sligo gentlewoman whose garden ran 
down to the river, ending there in a low wall full of 
wallflowers, and I would sit up upon my chair, very 
bored, while my elders ate their seed-cake and 
drank their sherry. My walks with the servants 
were more interesting ; sometimes we would pass a 
little fat girl and a servant persuaded me to write 
her a love-letter, and the next time she passed she 
put her tongue out. But it was the servant's 
stories that interested me. At such and such a cor- 
ner a man had got a shilling from a drill sergeant 
by standing in a barrel and had then rolled out 
of it and shown his crippled legs. And in such and 
such a house an old woman had hid herself under 
the bed of her guests, an officer and his wife, and 
on hearing them abuse her, beaten them with a 
broomstick. All the well-known families had their 

16 



grotesque or tragic or romantic legends, and I often 
said to myself how terrible it would be to go away 
and die where nobody would know my story. Years 
afterwards, when I was ten or twelve years old and 
in London, I would remember Sligo with tears, and 
when I began to write, it was there I hoped to find 
my audience. Next to Merville where I lived, was 
another tree-surrounded house where I sometimes 
went to see a little boy who stayed there occasion- 
ally with his grandmother, whose name I forget and 
who seemed to me kind and friendly, though when 
I went to see her in my thirteenth or fourteenth 
year I discovered that she only cared for very little 
boys. When the visitors called I hid in the hay-loft 
and lay hidden behind the great heap of hay while 
a servant was calling my name in the yard. 
I do not know how old I was (for all these events 
seem at the same distance) when I was made drunk. 
I had been out yachting with an uncle and my cous- 
ins and it had come on very rough. I had lain on 
deck between the mast and the bowsprit and a 
wave had burst over me and I had seen green water 
over my head. I was very proud and very wet. 
When we got into Rosses again, I was dressed up 
in an older boy's clothes so that the trousers came 
down below my boots and a pilot gave me a little 
raw whiskey. I drove home with the uncle on an 

17 



outside car and was so pleased with the strange 
state in which I found myself that for all my uncle 
could do, I cried to every passer-by that I was 
drunk, and went on crying it through the town and 
everywhere until I was put to bed by my grand- 
mother and given something to drink that tasted of 
black currants and so fell asleep. 

Ill 

Some six miles off towards Ben Bulben and beyond 
the Channel, as we call the tidal river between 
Sligo and the Rosses, and on top of a hill there was 
a little square two-storeyed house covered with 
creepers and looking out upon a garden where the 
box borders were larger than any I had ever seen, 
and where I saw for the first time the crimson 
streak of the gladiolus and awaited its blossom with 
excitement. Under one gable a dark thicket of 
small trees made a shut-in mysterious place, where 
one played and believed that something was going 
to happen. My great-aunt Micky lived there. 
Micky was not her right name for she was Mary 
Yeats and her father had been my great-grand- 
father, John Yeats, who had been Rector of Drum- 
cliffe, a few miles further off, and died in 1847. She 
was a spare, high-coloured, elderly woman and had 
the oldest looking cat I had ever seen, for its hair 

18 



had grown into matted locks of yellowy white. 
She farmed and had one old man-servant, but could 
not have farmed at all, had not neighbouring 
farmers helped to gather in the crops, in return for 
the loan of her farm implements and "out of re- 
spect for the family," for as Johnny MacGurk, the 
Sligo barber said to me, "the Yeats's were always 
very respectable." She was full of family history ; 
all her dinner knives were pointed like daggers 
through much cleaning, and there was a little 
James the First cream-jug with the Yeats motto 
and crest, and on her dining-room mantle-piece a 
beautiful silver cup that had belonged to my great- 
great-grandfather, who had married a certain Mary 
Butler. It had upon it the Butler crest and had 
been already old at the date 1534, when the initials 
of some bride and bridegroom were engraved under 
the lip. All its history for generations was rolled 
up inside it upon a piece of paper yellow with age, 
until some caller took the paper to light his pipe. 
Another family of Yeats, a widow and her two 
children on whom I called sometimes with my 
grandmother, lived near in a long low cottage, and 
owned a very fierce turkeycock that did battle with 
their visitors ; and some miles away lived the secre- 
tary to the Grand Jury and Land Agent, my great- 
uncle Mat Yeats and his big family of boys and 

19 



girls ; but I think it was only in later years that I 
came to know them well. I do not think any of 
these liked the Pollexfens, who were well off and 
seemed to them purse-proud, whereas they them- 
selves had come down in the world. I remember 
them as very well-bred and very religious in the 
Evangelical way and thinking a good deal of Aunt 
Micky's old histories. There had been among our 
ancestors a Kings County soldier, one of Marl- 
borough's generals, and when his nephew came to 
dine he gave him boiled pork, and when the nephew 
said he disliked boiled pork he had asked him to 
dine again and promised him something he would 
like better. However, he gave him boiled pork 
again and the nephew took the hint in silence. 
The other day as I was coming home from America, 
I met one of his descendants whose family has not 
another discoverable link with ours, and he too 
knew the boiled pork story and nothing else. We 
have the General's portrait, and he looks very fine 
in his armour and his long curly wig, and under- 
neath it, after his name, are many honours that 
have left no tradition among us. Were we country 
people, we could have summarised his life in a 
legend. 

Another ancestor or great-uncle had chased the 
United Irishmen for a fortnight, fallen into their 

20 



hands and been hanged, and the notorious Major 
Sirr who betrayed the brothers Shears, taking their 
children upon his knees to question them, if the tale 
does not lie, had been god-father to several of my 
great-great-grandfather's children ; while to make 
a balance, my great-grandfather had been Robert 
Emmett's friend and been suspected and imprisoned 
though but for a few hours. A great-uncle had been 
Governor of Penang, and led the forlorn hope at the 
taking of Rangoon, and an uncle of a still older gen- 
eration had fallen at New Orleans in 1813, and even 
in the last generation there had been lives of some 
power and pleasure. An old man who had enter- 
tained many famous people, in his 18th century 
house, where battlement and tower showed the in- 
fluence of Horace Walpole, had but lately, after 
losing all his money, drowned himself, first taking 
off his rings and chain and watch as became a 
collector of many beautiful things ; and once to 
remind us of more passionate life, a gun-boat put 
into Rosses, commanded by the illegitimate son of 
some great-uncle or other. Now that I can look at 
their miniatures, turning them over to find the 
name of soldier, or lawyer, or Castle official, and 
wondering if they cared for good books or good 
music, I am delighted with all that joins my life to 
those who had power in Ireland or with those any- 

21 



where that were good servants and poor bargainers, 
but I cared nothing as a child for Micky's tales. I 
could see my grandfather's ships come up the bay 
or the river, and his sailors treated me with defer- 
ence, and a ship's carpenter made and mended my 
toy boats and I thought that nobody could be so 
important as my grandfather. Perhaps, too, it is 
only now that I can value those more gentle natures 
so unlike his passion and violence. An old Sligo 
priest has told me how my great-grandfather John 
Yeats always went into his kitchen rattling the 
keys, so much did he fear finding some one doing 
wrong, and how when the agent of the great land- 
owner of his parish brought him from cottage to 
cottage to bid the women send their children to the 
Protestant school and all had promised till they 
came to one who cried, " child of mine will never 
darken your door," he had said "thank you, my wo- 
man, you are the first honest woman I have met to- 
day." My uncle, Mat Yeats, the Land Agent, had 
once waited up every night for a week to catch some 
boys who stole his apples and when he caught them 
had given them sixpence and told them not to do it 
again. Perhaps it is only fancy or the softening 
touch of the miniaturist that makes me discover in 
their faces some courtesy and much gentleness. 
Two 18th century faces interest me the most, one 

22 



that of a great-great-grandfather, for both have 
under their powdered curling wigs a half-feminine 
charm, and as I look at them I discover a something 
clumsy and heavy in myself. Yet it was a Yeats 
who spoke the only eulogy that turns my head. 
"We have ideas and no passions, but by marriage 
with a Pollexfen we have given a tongue to the sea 
cliffs." 

Among the miniatures there is a larger picture, an 
admirable drawing by I know not what master, that 
is too harsh and merry for its company. He was a 
connection and close friend of my great-grand- 
mother Corbet, and though we spoke of him as 
"Uncle Beattie" in our childhood, no blood rela- 
tion. My great-grandmother who died at ninety- 
three had many memories of him. He was the 
friend of Goldsmith & was accustomed to boast, 
clergyman though he was, that he belonged to a 
hunt-club of which every member but himself had 
been hanged or transported for treason, and that 
it was not possible to ask hirn a question he could 
not reply to with a perfectly appropriate blas- 
phemy or indecency. 

IV 

Because I had found it hard to attend to anything 
less interesting than my thoughts, I was difficult to 

23 



teach. Several of my uncles and aunts had tried to 
teach me to read, and because they could not, and 
because I was much older than children who read 
easily, had come to think, as I have learnt since, 
that I had not all my faculties. But for an accident 
they might have thought it for a long time. My 
father was staying in the house and never went to 
church, and that gave me the courage to refuse to 
set out one Sunday morning. I was often devout, 
my eyes filling with tears at the thought of God and 
of my own sins, but I hated church. My grand- 
mother tried to teach me to put my toes first to the 
ground because I suppose I stumped on my heels 
and that took my pleasure out of the way there. 
Later on when I had learnt to read I took pleasure 
in the words of the hymn, but never understood 
why the choir took three times as long as I did in 
getting to the end ; and the part of the service I 
liked, the sermon and passages of the Apocalypse 
and Ecclesiastes, were no compensation for all the 
repetitions and for the fatigue of so much standing. 
My father said if I would not go to church he would 
teach me to read. I think now that he wanted to 
make me go for my grandmother's sake and could 
think of no other way. He was an angry and im- 
patient teacher and flung the reading book at my 
head, and next Sunday I decided to go to church. 

24 



My father had, however, got interested in teaching 
me, and only shifted the lesson to a week-day till he 
had conquered my wandering mind. My first clear 
image of him was fixed on my imagination, I be- 
lieve, but a few days before the first lesson. He had 
just arrived from London and was walking up and 
down the nursery floor. He had a very black beard 
and hair, and one cheek bulged out with a fig that 
was there to draw the pain out of a bad tooth. One 
of the nurses (a nurse had come from London with 
my brothers and sisters) said to the other that a 
live frog, she had heard, was best of all. Then I was 
sent to a dame school kept by an old woman who 
stood us in rows and had a long stick like a billiard 
cue to get at the back rows. My father was still 
at Sligo when I came back from my first lesson and 
asked me what I had been taught. I said I had 
been taught to sing, and he said, "sing then" and I 
sang 

"Little drops of water, 
Little grains of sand, 
Make the mighty ocean, 
And the pleasant land " 

high up in my head. So my father wrote to the old 
woman that I was never to be taught to sing again, 
and afterwards other teachers were told the same 

25 



thing. Presently my eldest sister came on a long 
visit and she and I went to a little two-storeyed 
house in a poor street where an old gentlewoman 
taught us spelling and grammar. When we had 
learned our lesson well, we were allowed to look at 
a sword presented to her father who had led troops 
in India or China and to spell out a long compli- 
mentary inscription on the silver scabbard. As we 
walked to her house or home again we held a large 
umbrella before us, both gripping the handle and 
guiding ourselves by looking out of a round hole 
gnawed in the cover by a mouse. When I had got 
beyond books of one syllable, I began to spend my 
time in a room called the Library, though there 
were no books in it that I can remember except 
some old novels I never opened and a many 
volumed encyclopaedia published towards the end 
of the 18th century. I read this encyclopaedia a 
great deal and can remember a long passage con- 
sidering whether fossil wood despite its appearance 
might not be only a curiously shaped stone. 
My father's unbelief had set me thinking about the 
evidences of religion and I weighed the matter per- 
petually with great anxiety, for I did not think 
I could live without religion. All my religious 
emotions were, I think, connected with clouds and 
cloudy glimpses of luminous sky, perhaps because 

26 



of some bible picture of God's speaking to Abraham 
or the like. At least I can remember the sight mov- 
ing me to tears. One day I got a decisive argument 
for belief. A cow was about to calve, and I went to 
the field where the cow was with some farm-hands 
who carried a lantern, and next day I heard that the 
cow had calved in the early morning. I asked every- 
body how calves were born, and because nobody 
would tell me, made up my mind that nobody knew. 
They were the gift of God, that much was certain, 
but it was plain that nobody had ever dared to see 
them come, and children must come in the same 
way. I made up my mind that when I was a man 
I would wait up till calf or child had come. I was 
certain there would be a cloud and a burst of light 
and God would bring the calf in the cloud out of the 
light. That thought made me content until a boy 
of twelve or thirteen, who had come on a visit for 
the day, sat beside me in a hay-loft and explained 
all the mechanism of sex. He had learnt all about it 
from an elder boy whose pathic he was (to use a 
term he would not have understood) and his de- 
scription, given, as I can see now, as if he were telling 
of any other fact of physical life, made me miserable 
for weeks. After the first impression wore off, I be- 
gan to doubt if he had spoken truth, but one day I 
discovered a passage in the encyclopaedia, though I 

27 



only partly understood its long words, that con- 
firmed what he had said. I did not know enough to 
be shocked at his relation to the elder boy, but it 
was the first breaking of the dream of childhood. 
My realization of death came when my father and 
mother and my two brothers and my two sisters 
were on a visit. I was in the Library when I heard 
feet running past and heard somebody say in the 
passage that my younger brother, Robert, had died. 
He had been ill for some days. A little later my 
sister and I sat at the table, very happy, drawing 
ships with their flags half-mast high. We must have 
heard or seen that the ships in the harbour had their 
flags at half-mast. Next day at breakfast I heard 
people telling how my mother and the servant had 
heard the banshee crying the night before he died. 
It must have been after this that I told my grand- 
mother I did not want to go with her when she went 
to see old bed-ridden people because they would 
soon die. 

V 

At length when I was eight or nine an aunt said to 
me, "you are going to London. Here you are some- 
body. There you will be nobody at all." I knew at 
the time that her words were a blow at my father, 
not at me, but it was some years before I knew her 
reason. She thought so able a man as my father 

28 



could have found out some way of painting more 
popular pictures if he had set his mind to it and that 
it was wrong of him "to spend every evening at his 
club." She had mistaken, for what she would have 
considered a place of wantonness, Heatherley's Art 
School. 

My mother and brother and sister were at Sligo 
perhaps when I was sent to England, for my father 
and I and a group of landscape painters lodged at 
Burnham Beeches with an old Mr. and Mrs. Earle. 
My father was painting the first big pond you come 
to if you have driven from Slough through Farn- 
ham Royal. He began it in spring and painted all 
through the year, the picture changing with the 
seasons, and gave it up unfinished when he had 
painted the snow upon the heath-covered banks. 
He is never satisfied and can never make himself 
say that any picture is finished. In the evening he 
heard me my lessons or read me some novel of Feni- 
more Cooper's. I found delightful adventures in 
the woods — one day a blind worm and an adder 
fighting in a green hollow, and sometimes Mrs. 
Earle would be afraid to tidy the room because I 
had put a bottle full of newts on the mantle-piece. 
Now and then a boy from a farm on the other side 
of the road threw a pebble at my window at day- 
break, and he and I went fishing in the big second 

29 



pond. Now and then another farmer's boy and I 
shot sparrows with an old pepper box revolver and 
the boy would roast them on a string. There was 
an old horse one of the painters called the scaffold- 
ing, and sometimes a son of old Earle's drove with 
me to Slough and once to Windsor, and at Windsor 
we made our lunch of cold sausages bought from a 
public house. I did not know what it was to be 
alone, for I could wander in pleasant alarm through 
the enclosed parts, then very large, or round some 
pond imagining ships going in and out among the 
reeds and thinking of Sligo or of strange seafaring 
adventures in the fine ship I should launch when I 
grew up. I had always a lesson to learn before night 
and that was a continual misery, for I could very 
rarely, with so much to remember, set my thoughts 
upon it and then only in fear. One day my father 
told me that a painter had said I was very thick- 
skinned and did not mind what was said to me, and 
I could not understand how anybody could be so 
unjust. It made me wretched to be idle but one 
could not help it. I was once surprised and shocked. 
All but my father and myself had been to London, 
and Kennedy and Farrar and Page, I remember the 
names vaguely, arrived laughing and talking. One 
of them had carried off a card of texts from the 
waiting room of the station and hung it up on the 

30 



wall. I thought "he has stolen it," but my father 
and all made it a theme of merry conversation. 
Then I returned to Sligo for a few weeks as I was to 
do once or twice in every year for years, and after 
that we settled in London. Perhaps my mother and 
the other children had been there all the time, for I 
remember my father now and again going to Lon- 
don. The first house we lived in was close to Burne 
Jones's house at North End, but we moved after a 
year or two to Bedford Park. At North End we had 
a pear tree in the garden and plenty of pears, but 
the pears used to be full of maggots, and almost op- 
posite lived a school-master called O'Neill, and 
when a little boy told me that the school-master's 
great-grandfather had been a king I did not doubt it. 
I was sitting against the hedge and iron railing of 
some villa-garden there, when I heard one boy say 
to another it was something wrong with my liver 
that gave me such a dark complexion and that I 
could not live more than a year. I said to myself a 
year is a very long time, one can do such a lot of 
things in a year, and put it out of my head. When 
my father gave me a holiday and later when I had 
a holiday from school I took my schooner boat to 
the round pond, sailing it very commonly against 
the two cutter yachts of an old naval officer. He 
would sometimes look at the ducks and say, "I 

31 



would like to take that fellow home for my dinner," 
and he sang me a sailor's song about a coffin ship 
which left Sligo after the great famine, that made 
me feel very important. The servants at Sligo had 
told me the story. When she was moved from the 
berth she had lain in, an unknown dead man's body 
had floated up, a very evil omen ; and my grand- 
father, who was Lloyds' agent, had condemned her, 
but she slipped out in the night. The pond had its 
own legends ; and a boy who had seen a certain 
model steamer "burned to the water's edge" was 
greatly valued as a friend. There was a little boy I 
was kind to because I knew his father had done 
something disgraceful, though I did not know what. 
It was years before I discovered that his father was 
but the maker of certain popular statues, many of 
which are now in public places. I had heard my 
father's friends speak of him. Sometimes my sister 
came with me, and we would look into all the sweet 
shops & toy shops on our way home, especially into 
one opposite Holland House because there was a 
cutter yacht made of sugar in the window, and we 
drank at all the fountains. Once a stranger spoke to 
us and bought us sweets and came with us almost to 
our door. We asked him to come in and told him 
our father's name. He would not come in, but 
laughed and said, "Oh, that is the painter who 

32 



YfiffU'Ti^ 













\ 



f 



c' 

f-rom a rl m tri n q h\i ' j. 03 r l/ratj made in L86j 



'■ 



scrapes out every day what he painted the day be- 
fore." A poignant memory came upon me the other 
day while I was passing the drinking-fountain near 
Holland Park, for there I and my sister had spoken 
together of our longing for Sligo and our hatred of 
London. I know we were both very close to tears 
and remember with wonder, for I had never known 
anyone that cared for such momentoes, that I 
longed for a sod of earth from some field I knew, 
something of Sligo to hold in my hand. It was some 
old race instinct like that of a savage, for we had 
been brought up to laugh at all display of emotion. 
Yet it was our mother, who would have thought its 
display a vulgarity, who kept alive that love. She 
would spend hours listening to stories or telling 
stories of the pilots and fishing people of Rosses 
Point, or of her own Sligo girlhood, and it was al- 
ways assumed between her and us that Sligo was 
more beautiful than other places. I can see now that 
she had great depth of feeling, that she was her 
father's daughter. My memory of what she was 
like in those days has grown very dim, but I think 
her sense of personality, her desire of any life of her 
own, had disappeared in her care for us and in much 
anxiety about money. I always see her sewing or 
knitting in spectacles and wearing some plain dress. 
Yet ten years ago when I was in San Francisco, 

33 



an old cripple came to see me who had left Sligo be- 
fore her marriage ; he came to tell me, he said, that 
my mother "had been the most beautiful girl in 
Sligo." 

The only lessons I had ever learned were those my 
father taught me, for he terrified me by descrip- 
tions of my moral degradation and he humiliated 
me by my likeness to disagreeable people ; but 
presently I was sent to school at Hammersmith. It 
was a Gothic building of yellow brick : a large hall 
full of desks, some small class-rooms and a separate 
house for boarders, all built perhaps in 1840 or 1850. 
I thought it an ancient building and that it had be- 
longed to the founder of the school, Lord Godol- 
phin, who was romantic to me because there was a 
novel about him. I never read the novel, but I 
thought only romantic people were put in books. 
On one side, there was a piano factory of yellow 
brick, upon two sides half finished rows of little 
shops and villas all yellow brick, and on the fourth 
side, outside the wall of our playing field, a brickfield 
of cinders and piles of half-burned yellow bricks. All 
the names and faces of my school -fellows have faded 
from me except one name without a face and the 
face and name of one friend, mainly no doubt be- 
cause it was all so long ago, but partly because I 
only seem to remember things that have mixed 

34 



themselves up with scenes that have some quality 
to bring them again and again before the memory. 
For some days, as I walked homeward along the 
Hammersmith Road, I told myself that whatever I 
most cared for had been taken away. I had found a 
small, green -covered book given to my father by a 
Dublin man of science ; it gave an account of the 
strange sea creatures the man of science had dis- 
covered among the rocks at Howth or dredged out 
of Dublin Bay. It had long been my favourite 
book ; and when I read it I believed that I was 
growing very wise, but now I should have no time 
for it nor for my own thoughts. Every moment 
would be taken up learning or saying lessons or 
walking between school and home four times a day, 
for I came home in the middle of the day for dinner. 
But presently I forgot my trouble, absorbed in two 
things I had never known, companionship and en- 
mity. After my first day's lesson, a circle of boys 
had got around me in a playing field and asked me 
questions, "who's your father?" "what does he 
do ? " "how much money has he ? " Presently a boy 
said something insulting. I had never struck any- 
body or been struck, and now all in a minute, with- 
out any intention upon my side, but as if I had been 
a doll moved by a string, I was hitting at the boys 
within reach and being hit. After that I was called 

35 



names for being Irish, and had many fights and 
never, for years, got the better of any one of them ; 
for I was delicate and had no muscles. Sometimes, 
however, I found means of retaliation, even of ag- 
gression. There was a boy with a big stride, much 
feared by little boys, and finding him alone in the 
playing field, I went up to him and said, "rise upon 
Sugaun and sink upon Gad." "What does that 
mean ? " he said. "Rise upon hay -leg and sink upon 
straw," I answered and told him that in Ireland 
the sergeant tied straw and hay to the ankles of a 
stupid recruit to show him the difference between 
his legs. My ears were boxed, and when I com- 
plained to my friends, they said I had brought it 
upon myself ; and that I deserved all I got. I prob- 
ably dared myself to other feats of a like sort, 
for I did not think English people intelligent or 
well-behaved unless they were artists. Everyone 
I knew well in Sligo despised Nationalists and 
Catholics, but all disliked England with a prejudice 
that had come down perhaps from the days of the 
Irish Parliament. I knew stories to the discredit of 
England, and took them all seriously. My mother 
had met some English woman who did not like 
Dublin because the legs of the men were too 
straight, and at Sligo, as everybody knew, an Eng- 
lishman had once said to a car-driver, "if you 

36 



people were not so lazy, you would pull down the 
mountain and spread it out over the sand and that 
would give you acres of good fields." At Sligo there 
is a wide river mouth and at ebb tide most of it is 
dry sand, but all Sligo knew that in some way I can- 
not remember it was the spreading of the tide over 
the sand that left the narrow channel fit for snip- 
ing. At any rate the carman had gone chuckling all 
over Sligo with his tale. People would tell it to 
prove that Englishmen were always grumbling. 
"They grumble about their dinners and everything 
— there was an Englishman who wanted to pull 
down Knock-na-Rea " and so on. My mother had 
shown them to me kissing at railway stations, and 
taught me to feel disgust at their lack of reserve, 
and my father told how my grandfather, William 
Yeats, who had died before I was born, when he 
came home to his Rectory in County Down from an 
English visit, spoke of some man he had met on a 
coach road who "Englishman -like" told him all his 
affairs. My father explained that an Englishman 
generally believed that his private affairs did him 
credit, while an Irishman, being poor and probably 
in debt, had no such confidence. I, however, did 
not believe in this explanation. My Sligo nurses, 
who had in all likelihood the Irish Catholic political 
hatred, had never spoken well of any Englishman. 

37 



Once when walking in the town of Sligo I had 
turned to look after an English man and woman 
whose clothes attracted me. The man I remember 
had gray clothes and knee-breeches and the woman 
a gray dress, and my nurse had said contemptu- 
ously, "towrows." Perhaps before my time, there 
had been some English song with the burden "tow 
row row," and everybody had told me that English 
people ate skates and even dog-fish, and I myself 
had only just arrived in England when I saw an old 
man put marmalade in his porridge. I was divided 
from all those boys, not merely by the anecdotes 
that are everywhere perhaps a chief expression of 
the distrust of races, but because our mental im- 
ages were different. I read their boys' books and 
they excited me, but if I read of some English vic- 
tory, I did not believe that I read of my own people. 
They thought of Cressy and Agincourt and the 
Union Jack and were all very patriotic, and I, with- 
out those memories of Limerick and the Yellow 
Ford that would have strengthened an Irish Catho- 
lic, thought of mountain and lake, of my grand- 
father and of ships. Anti-Irish feeling was running 
high, for the Land League had been founded and 
landlords had been shot, and I, who had no politics, 
was yet full of pride, for it is romantic to live in a 
dangerous country. 

38 



I daresay I thought the rough manners of a cheap 
school, as my grandfather Yeats had those of a 
chance companion, typical of all England. At any 
rate I had a harassed life & got many a black eye 
and had many outbursts of grief and rage. Once a 
boy, the son of a great Bohemian glass-maker, and 
who was older than the rest of us, and had been sent 
out of his country because of a love affair, beat a boy 
for me because we were "both foreigners." And a 
boy, who grew to be the school athlete and my chief 
friend, beat a great many. His are the face and 
name that I remember — his name was of Hugue- 
not origin and his face like his gaunt and lithe body 
had something of the American Indian in colour 
and lineament. 

I was very much afraid of the other boys, and that 
made me doubt myself for the first time. When I 
had gathered pieces of wood in the corner for my 
great ship, I was confident that I could keep calm 
among the storms and die fighting when the great 
battle came. But now I was ashamed of my lack of 
courage ; for I wanted to be like my grandfather 
who thought so little of danger that he had jumped 
overboard in the Bay of Biscay after an old hat. I 
was very much afraid of physical pain, and one day 
when I had made some noise in class, my friend the 
athlete was accused and I allowed him to get two 

39 



strokes of the cane before I gave myself up. He had 
held out his hands without flinching and had not 
rubbed them on his sides afterwards. I was not 
caned, but was made to stand up for the rest of the 
lesson. I suffered very much afterwards when the 
thought came to me, but he did not reproach me. 
I had been some years at school before I had my 
last fight. My friend, the athlete, had given me 
many months of peace, but at last refused to beat 
any more and said I must learn to box, and not go 
near the other boys till I knew how. I went home 
with him every day and boxed in his room, and the 
bouts had always the same ending. My excitability 
gave me an advantage at first and I would drive 
him across the room, and then he would drive me 
across and it would end very commonly with my 
nose bleeding. One day his father, an elderly 
banker, brought us out into the garden and tried to 
make us box in a cold-blooded, courteous way, but 
it was no use. At last he said I might go near the 
boys again and I was no sooner inside the gate of 
the playing field than a boy flung a handful of 
mud and cried out "mad Irishman." I hit him 
several times on the face without being hit, till the 
boys round said we should make friends. I held 
out my hand in fear ; for I knew if we went on I 
should be beaten, and he took it sullenly. I had so 

40 



poor a reputation as a fighter that it was a great dis- 
grace to him, and even the masters made fun of his 
swollen face ; and though some little boys came in 
a deputation to ask me to lick a boy they named, I 
had never another fight with a school-fellow. We 
had a great many fights with the street boys and 
the boys of a neighbouring charity school. We had 
always the better because we were not allowed to 
fling stones, and that compelled us to close or do 
our best to close. The monitors had been told to 
report any boy who fought in the street, but they 
only reported those who flung stones. I always ran 
at the athlete's heels, but I never hit anyone. My 
father considered these fights absurd, and even that 
they were an English absurdity, and so I could not 
get angry enough to like hitting and being hit ; and 
then too my friend drove the enemy before him. He 
had no doubts or speculations to lighten his fist upon 
an enemy, that, being of low behaviour, should be 
beaten as often as possible, and there were real 
wrongs to avenge : one of our boys had been killed 
by the blow of a stone hid in a snowball. Sometimes 
we on our side got into trouble with the parents of 
boys. There was a quarrel between the athlete and 
an old German who had a barber's shop we passed 
every day on our way home, and one day he spat 
through the window and hit the German on his bald 

41 



head — the monitors had not forbidden spitting. 
The German ran after us, but when the athlete 
squared up he went away. Now, though I knew it 
was not right to spit at people, my admiration for 
my friend arose to a great height. I spread his fame 
over the school, and next day there was a fine stir 
when somebody saw the old German going up the 
gravel walk to the head-master's room. Presently 
there was such a noise in the passage that even the 
master had to listen. It was the head-master's red- 
haired brother turning the old German out and 
shouting to the man-servant "see that he doesn't 
steal the top-coats." We heard afterwards that he 
had asked the names of the two boys who passed his 
window every day and been told the names of the 
two head boys who passed also but were notoriously 
gentlemanly in their manners. Yet my friend was 
timid also and that restored my confidence in my- 
self. He would often ask me to buy the sweets or 
the ginger-beer because he was afraid sometimes 
when speaking to a stranger. 

I had one reputation that I valued. At first when I 
went to the Hammersmith swimming-baths with 
the other boys, I was afraid to plunge in until I had 
gone so far down the ladder that the water came up 
to my thighs ; but one day when I was alone I fell 
from the spring-board which was five or six feet 

42 



above the water. After that I would dive from a 
greater height than the others and I practised swim- 
ming under water and pretending not to be out of 
breath when I came up. And then if I ran a race, I 
took care not to pant or show any sign of strain. 
And in this I had an advantage even over the ath- 
lete ; for though he could run faster and was harder 
to tire than anybody else, he grew very pale and I 
was often paid compliments. I used to run with my 
friend when he was training to keep him in com- 
pany. He would give me a long start and soon over- 
take me. 

I followed the career of a certain professional runner 
for months, buying papers that would tell me if he 
had won or lost. I had seen him described as "the 
bright particular star of American athletics," and 
the wonderful phrase had thrown enchantment 
over him. Had he been called the particular bright 
star, I should have cared nothing for him. I did not 
understand the symptom for years after. I was 
nursing my own dream, my form of the common 
school-boy dream, though I was no longer gathering 
the little pieces of broken and rotting wood. Often, 
instead of learning my lesson, I covered the white 
squares of the chessboard on my little table with 
pen and ink pictures of myself, doing all kinds of 
courageous things. One day my father said "there 

43 



was a man in Nelson's ship at the battle of Trafal- 
gar, a ship's purser, whose hair turned white ; what 
a sensitive temperament ; that man should have 
achieved something ! " I was vexed and bewildered, 
and am still bewildered and still vexed, finding it a 
poor and crazy thing that we who have imagined so 
many noble persons cannot bring our flesh to heel. 

VI 

The head-master was a clergyman, a good-hu- 
moured, easy-going man, as temperate, one had no 
doubt, in his religious life as in all else, and if he ever 
lost sleep on our account, it was from a very proper 
anxiety as to our gentility. I was in disgrace once 
because I went to school in some brilliant blue 
homespun serge my mother had bought in Dev- 
onshire, and I was told I must never wear it again. 
He had tried several times, though he must have 
known it was hopeless, to persuade our parents to 
put us into Eton clothes, and on certain days we 
were compelled to wear gloves. After my first year, 
we were forbidden to play marbles because it was a 
form of gambling and was played by nasty little 
boys, and a few months later told not to cross our 
legs in class. It was a school for the sons of profes- 
sional men who had failed or were at the outset 
of their career, and the boys held an indignation 

44 



meeting when they discovered that a new boy was 
an apothecary's son (I think at first I was his only 
friend,) and we all pretended that our parents were 
richer than they were. I told a little boy who had 
often seen my mother knitting or mending my 
clothes that she only mended or knitted because 
she liked it, though I knew it was necessity. 
It was like, I suppose, most schools of its type, an 
obscene, bullying place, where a big boy would hit 
a small boy in the wind to see him double up, and 
where certain boys, too young for any emotion of 
sex, would sing the dirty songs of the street, but I 
daresay it suited me better than a better school. I 
have heard the head-master say, "how has so-and- 
so done in his Greek?" and the class-master reply, 
"very badly, but he is doing well in his cricket," 
and the head-master has gone away saying "Oh, 
leave him alone." I was unfitted for school work, 
and though I would often work well for weeks to- 
gether, I had to give the whole evening to one 
lesson if I was to know it. My thoughts were a 
great excitement, but when I tried to do any- 
thing with them, it was like trying to pack a 
balloon into a shed in a high wind. I was always 
near the bottom of my class, and always making 
excuses that but added to my timidity ; but no 
master was rough with me. I was known to collect 

45 



moths and butterflies and to get into no worse 
mischief than hiding now and again an old tailless 
white rat in my coat-pocket or my desk. There was 
but one interruption of our quiet habits, the brief 
engagement of an Irish master, a fine Greek scholar 
and vehement teacher, but of fantastic speech. He 
would open the class by saying, "there he goes, 
there he goes," or some like words as the head- 
master passed by at the end of the hall. " Of course 
this school is no good. How could it be with a 
clergyman for head-master?" And then perhaps 
his eye would light on me, and he would make me 
stand up and tell me it was a scandal I was so idle 
when all the world knew that any Irish boy was 
cleverer than a whole class-room of English boys, a 
description I had to pay for afterwards. Sometimes 
he would call up a little boy who had a girl's face 
and kiss him upon both cheeks and talk of taking 
him to Greece in the holidays, and presently we 
heard he had written to the boy's parents about it, 
but long before the holidays he was dismissed. 

VII 

Two pictures come into my memory. I have 
climbed to the top of a tree by the edge of the play- 
ing field, and am looking at my school -fellows and 
am as proud of myself as a March cock when it 

46 



crows to its first sunrise. I am saying to myself, "if 
when I grow up I am as clever among grown-up 
men as I am among these boys, I shall be a famous 
man." I remind myself how they think all the 
same things and cover the school walls at election 
times with the opinions their fathers find in the 
newspapers. I remind myself that I am an artist's 
son and must take some work as the whole end of 
life and not think as the others do of becoming well 
off and living pleasantly. The other picture is of a 
hotel sitting-room in the Strand, where a man is 
hunched up over the fire. He is a cousin who has 
speculated with another cousin's money and has 
fled from Ireland in danger of arrest. My father 
has brought us to spend the evening with him, to 
distract him from the remorse my father knows 
that he must be suffering. 

VIII 

For years Bedford Park was a romantic excitement. 
At North End my father had announced at break- 
fast that our glass chandelier was absurd and was to 
be taken down, and a little later he described the 
village Norman Shaw was building. I had thought 
he said, "there is to be a wall round and no news- 
papers to be allowed in." And when I had told him 
how put out I was at finding neither wall nor gate, 

47 



he explained that he had merely described what 
ought to be. We were to see De Morgan tiles, pea- 
cock-blue doors and the pomegranate pattern and 
the tulip pattern of Morris, and to discover that we 
had always hated doors painted with imitation 
grain and the roses of mid-Victoria, and tiles 
covered with geometrical patterns that seemed to 
have been shaken out of a muddy kaleidoscope. We 
went to live in a house like those we had seen in pic- 
tures and even met people dressed like people 
in the storybooks. The streets were not straight and 
dull as at North End, but wound about where there 
was a big tree or for the mere pleasure of winding, 
and there were wood palings instead of iron railings. 
The newness of everything, the empty houses where 
we played at hide-and-seek, and the strangeness of 
it all, made us feel that we were living among toys. 
We could imagine people living happy lives as we 
thought people did long ago when the poor were 
picturesque and the master of a house would tell of 
strange adventures over the sea. Only the better 
houses had been built. The commercial builder had 
not begun to copy and to cheapen, and besides we 
only knew the most beautiful houses, the houses of 
artists. My two sisters and my brother and myself 
had dancing lessons in a low, red-brick and tiled 
house that drove away dreams, long cherished, of 

48 




H'r/in Mu Her QJ&cuU 

jTrm rt ir a tercel 'on r r/rr/irt/ia /'// li i in.; rl '/' 



some day living in a house made exactly like a 
ship's cabin. The dining-room table, where Sinbad 
the sailor might have sat, was painted peacock - 
blue, and the woodwork was all peacock -blue and 
upstairs there was a window niche so big and 
high up, there was a flight of steps to go up and 
down by and a table in the niche. The two sisters 
of the master of the house, a well-known pre- 
Raphaelite painter, were our teachers, and they 
and their old mother were dressed in peacock- 
blue and in dresses so simply cut that they seemed 
a part of every story. Once when I had been look- 
ing with delight at the old woman, my father who 
had begun to be influenced by French art, mut- 
tered, "imagine dressing up your old mother like 
that." 

My father's friends were painters who had been in- 
fluenced by the pre-Raphaelite movement but had 
lost their confidence. Wilson, Page, Nettleship, 
Potter are the names I remember, and at North 
End, I remember them most clearly. I often heard 
one and another say that Rossetti had never mas- 
tered his materials, and though Nettleship had al- 
ready turned lion-painter, my father talked con- 
stantly of the designs of his youth, especially of 
"God creating Evil," which Browning praised in a 
letter my father had seen "as the most sublime 
E 49 



conception in ancient or modern Art." In those 
early days, that he might not be tempted from his 
work by society, he had made a rent in the tail of 
his coat ; and I have heard my mother tell how she 
had once sewn it up, but before he came again he 
had pulled out all the stitches. Potter's exquisite 
"Dormouse," now in the Tate Gallery, hung in our 
house for years. His dearest friend was a pretty 
model who was, when my memory begins, working 
for some position in a board-school. I can remem- 
ber her sitting at the side of the throne in the North 
End Studio, a book in her hand and my father 
hearing her say a Latin lesson. Her face was the 
typical mild, oval face of the painting of that time, 
and may indeed have helped in the moulding of an 
ideal of beauty. I found it the other day drawn in 
pencil on a blank leaf of a volume of the" Earthly 
Paradise." It was at Bedford Park that I had heard 
Farrar, whom I had first known at Burnham 
Beeches, tell of Potter's death and burial. Potter 
had been very poor and had died from the effects 
of semi-starvation. He had lived so long on bread 
and tea that his stomach withered — I am sure that 
was the word used, and when his relations found 
out and gave him good food, it was too late. Farrar 
had been at the funeral and had stood behind some 
well-to-do people who were close about the grave 

50 



and saw one point to the model, who had followed 
the hearse on foot and was now crying at a distance, 
and say, "that is the woman who had all his 
money." She had often begged him to allow her to 
pay his debts, but he would not have it. Probably 
his rich friends blamed his poor friends, and they 
the rich, and I daresay, nobody had known enough 
to help him. Besides, he had a strange form of 
dissipation, I had heard someone say ; he was de- 
voted to children, and would become interested in 
some child — his "Dormouse" is a portrait of a 
child — and spend his money on its education. My 
sister remembers seeing him paint with a dark glove 
on his right hand, and his saying that he had used 
so much varnish the reflection of the hand would 
have teased him but for the glove. "I will soon 
have to paint my face some dark colour," he added. 
I have no memory, however, but of noticing that 
he sat at the easel, whereas my father always stands 
and walks up and down, and that there was dark 
blue, a colour that always affects me, in the back- 
ground of his picture. There is a public gallery of 
Wilson's work in his native Aberdeen and my sis- 
ters have a number of his landscapes — wood- 
scenes for the most part — painted with phlegm 
and melancholy, the romantic movement drawing 
to its latest phase. 

51 



IX 

My father read out to me, for the first time, when I 
was eight or nine years old. Between Sligo and 
Rosses Point, there is a tongue of land covered with 
coarse grass that runs out into the sea or the mud 
according to the state of the tide. It is the place 
where dead horses are buried. Sitting there, my 
father read me "The Lays of Ancient Rome." It 
was the first poetry that had moved me after the 
stable-boy's "Orange Rhymes." Later on he read 
me "Ivanhoe" and "The Lay of the Last Min- 
strel," and they are still vivid in the memory. I re- 
read "Ivanhoe" the other day, but it has all 
vanished except Gurth, the swineherd, at the outset 
and Friar Tuck and his venison pasty, the two 
scenes that laid hold of me in childhood. "The Lay 
of the Last Minstrel " gave me a wish to turn magi- 
cian that competed for years with the dream of 
being killed upon the sea-shore. When I first went 
to school, he tried to keep me from reading boys' 
papers, because a paper, by its very nature, as he 
explained to me, had to be made for the average 
boy or man and so could not but thwart one's 
growth. He took away my paper and I had not 
courage to say that I was but reading and delighting 
in a prose re-telling of the Iliad. But after a few 

52 



months, my father said he had been too anxious and 
became less urgent about my lessons and less vio- 
lent if I had learnt them badly, and he ceased to 
notice what I read. From that on I shared the ex- 
citement which ran through all my fellows on Wed- 
nesday afternoons when the boys' papers were 
published, and I read endless stories I have for- 
gotten as completely as Grimm's Fairy Tales that I 
read at Sligo, and all of Hans Andersen except the 
Ugly Duckling which my mother had read to me 
and to my sisters. I remember vaguely that I liked 
Hans Andersen better than Grimm because he was 
less homely, but even he never gave me the knights 
and dragons and beautiful ladies that I longed for. I 
have remembered nothing that I read, but only 
those things that I heard or saw. When I was ten or 
twelve my father took me to see Irving play Ham- 
let, and did not understand why I preferred Irving 
to Ellen Terry, who was, I can now see, the idol of 
himself and his friends. I could not think of her, as 
I could of Irving's Hamlet, as but myself, and I was 
not old enough to care for feminine charm and 
beauty. For many years Hamlet was an image of 
heroic self-possession for the poses of youth and 
childhood to copy, a combatant of the battle within 
myself. My father had read me the story of the 
little boy murdered by the Jews in Chaucer and the 

53 



tale of Sir Topaz, explaining the hard words, and 
though both excited me, I had liked Sir Topaz best 
and been disappointed that it left off in the middle. 
As I grew older, he would tell me plots of Balzac's 
novels, using incident or character as an illustration 
for some profound criticism of life. Now that I have 
read all the Comedie Humaine, certain pages have 
an unnatural emphasis, straining and overbalanc- 
ing the outline, and I remember how in some subur- 
ban street, he told me of Lucien de Rubempre, or of 
the duel after the betrayal of his master, and how 
the wounded Lucien had muttered "so much the 
worse " when he heard someone say that he was not 
dead. 

I now can but share with a friend my thoughts and 
my emotions, and there is a continual discovery of 
difference, but in those days, before I had found 
myself, we could share adventures. When friends 
plan and do together, their minds become one mind 
and the last secret disappears. I was useless at 
games. I cannot remember that I ever kicked a 
goal or made a run, but I was a mine of knowledge 
when I and the athlete and those two notoriously 
gentlemanly boys — theirs was the name that I re- 
member without a face — set out for Richmond 
Park, for Coomb Wood or Twyford Abbey to look 
for butterflies and moths and beetles. Sometimes 

54 



to-day I meet people at lunch or dinner whose 
address will sound familiar and I remember of a 
sudden how a game-keeper chased me from the 
plantation behind their house, and how I have 
turned over the cow-dung in their paddock in the 
search for some rare beetle believed to haunt the 
spot. The athlete was our watchman and our 
safety. He would suggest, should we meet a carriage 
on the drive, that we take off our hats and walk on 
as though about to pay a call. And once when we 
were sighted by a game-keeper at Coomb Wood, 
he persuaded the eldest of the brothers to pretend to 
be a school-master taking his boys for a walk, and 
the keeper, instead of swearing and threatening the 
law, was sad and argumentative. No matter how 
charming the place, (and there is a little stream in 
a hollow where Wimbledon Common flows into 
Coomb Wood that is pleasant in the memory,) I 
knew that those other boys saw something I did not 
see. I was a stranger there. There was something 
in their way of saying the names of places that made 
me feel this. 

X 

When I arrived at the Clarence Basin, Liverpool, 
(the dock Clarence Mangan had his first name 
from) on my way to Sligo for my holidays I was 
among Sligo people. When I was a little boy, an old 

55 



woman who had come to Liverpool with crates of 
fowl, made me miserable by throwing her arms 
around me the moment I had alighted from my cab 
and telling the sailor who carried my luggage that 
she had held me in her arms when I was a baby. 
The sailor may have known me almost as well, for I 
was often at Sligo quay to sail my boat ; and I came 
and went once or twice in every year upon the ss. 
Sligo or the ss. Liverpool which belonged to a com- 
pany that had for directors my grandfather and his 
partner William Middleton. I was always pleased if 
it was the Liverpool, for she had been built to run 
the blockade during the war of North and South. 
I waited for this voyage always with excitement 
and boasted to other boys about it, and when I was 
a little boy had walked with my feet apart as I had 
seen sailors walk. I used to be sea-sick, but I must 
have hidden this from the other boys and partly 
even from myself ; for, as I look back, I remember 
very little about it, while I remember stories I was 
told by the captain or by his first mate, and the look 
of the great cliffs of Donegal & Tory Island men 
coming alongside with lobsters, talking Irish and, if 
it was night, blowing on a burning sod to draw our 
attention. The captain, an old man with square 
shoulders and a fringe of grey hair round his face, 
would tell his first mate, a very admiring man, of 

56 



fights he had had on shore at Liverpool ; and 
perhaps it was of him I was thinking when I was 
very small and asked my grandmother if God was 
as strong as sailors. Once, at any rate, he had been 
nearly wrecked ; the Liverpool had been all but 
blown upon the Mull of Galloway with her shaft 
broken, and the captain had said to his mate, 
"mind and jump when she strikes, for we don't 
want to be killed by the falling spars ;" and when 
the mate answered, "my God, I cannot swim," he 
had said, "who could keep afloat for five minutes 
in a sea like that?" He would often say his mate 
was the most timid of men and that "a girl along 
the quays could laugh him out of anything." My 
grandfather had more than once given the mate a 
ship of his own, but he had always thrown up his 
berth to sail with his old captain where he felt safe. 
Once he had been put in charge of a ship in a dry 
dock in Liverpool, but a boy was drowned in Sligo, 
and before the news could reach him he wired to his 
wife, "ghost, come at once, or I will throw up 
berth." He had been wrecked a number of times 
and maybe that had broken his nerve or maybe he 
had a sensitiveness that would in another class have 
given him taste & culture. I once forgot a copy of 
"Count Robert of Paris" on a deck-seat, and when 
I found it again, it was all covered with the prints of 

57 



his dirty thumb. He had once seen the coach-a-baur 
or death coach. It came along the road, he said, till 
it was hidden by a cottage and it never came out on 
the other side of the cottage. Once I smelled new- 
mown hay when we were quite a long way from 
land, and once when I was watching the sea-parrots 
(as the sailors call the puffin) I noticed they had dif- 
ferent ways of tucking their heads under their wings, 
or I fancied it and said to the captain ' ' they have dif- 
ferent characters." Sometimes my father came too, 
and the sailors when they saw him coming would 
say "there is John Yeats and we shall have a 
storm," for he was considered unlucky. 
I no longer cared for little shut-in-places, for a cop- 
pice against the stable-yard at Merville where my 
grandfather lived or against the gable at Seaview 
where Aunt Micky lived, and I began to climb the 
mountains, sometimes with the stable-boy for com- 
panion, and to look up their stories in the county 
history. I fished for trout with a worm in the 
mountain streams and went out herring-fishing at 
night : and because my grandfather had said the 
English were in the right to eat skates, I carried a 
large skate all the six miles or so from Rosses Point, 
but my grandfather did not eat it. 
One night just as the equinoctial gales were coming 
when I was sailing home in the coastguard's boat a 

58 



boy told me a beetle of solid gold, strayed maybe 
from Poe's "gold bug," had been seen by somebody 
in Scotland and I do not think that either of us 
doubted his news. Indeed, so many stories did I 
hear from sailors along the wharf, or round the fo'- 
castle fire of the little steamer that ran between 
Sligo and Rosses, or from boys out fishing that the 
world was full of monsters and marvels. The 
foreign sailors wearing ear-rings did not tell me 
stories, but like the fishing boys, I gazed at them 
in wonder and admiration. When I look at my 
brother's picture, "Memory Harbour," houses and 
anchored ship and distant lighthouse all set close 
together as in some old map, I recognize in the blue- 
coated man with the mass of white shirt the pilot I 
went fishing with, and I am full of disquiet and of ex- 
citement, and I am melancholy because I have not 
made more and better verses. I have walked on 
Sinbad's yellow shore and never shall another hit 
my fancy. 

I had still my red pony, and once my father came 
with me riding too, and was very exacting. He was 
indignant and threatening because he did not think 
I rode well. "You must do everything well," he 
said, "that the Pollexfens respect, though you must 
do other things also." He used to say the same 
about my lessons, and tell me to be good at mathe- 

59 



matics. I can see now that he had a sense of in- 
feriority among those energetic, successful people. 
He himself, some Pollexfen told me, though he rode 
very badly, would go hunting upon anything and 
take any ditch. His father, the County Down 
Rector, though a courtly man and a scholar, had 
been so dandified a horseman that I had heard of 
his splitting three riding breeches before he had 
settled into his saddle for a day's hunting, and of 
his first rector exclaiming, "I had hoped for a cu- 
rate but they have sent me a jockey." 
Left to myself, I rode without ambition though get- 
ting many falls, and more often to Rathbroughan 
where my great-uncle Mat lived, than to any place 
else. His children and I used to sail our toy -boats in 
the river before his house, arming them with toy- 
cannon, touch-paper at all the touch-holes, always 
hoping but always in vain that they would not 
twist about in the eddies but fire their cannon at 
one another. I must have gone to Sligo sometimes 
in the Christmas holidays, for I can remember riding 
my red pony to a hunt. He balked at the first jump, 
to my relief, and when a crowd of boys began to 
beat him, I would not allow it. They all jeered at 
me for being afraid. I found a gap and when I was 
alone in a field tried another ditch, but the pony 
would not jump that either ; so I tied him to a tree 

60 



and lay down among the ferns and looked up into 
the sky. On my way home I met the hunt again 
and noticed that everybody avoided the dogs, and 
because I wanted to find out why they did so I rode 
to where the dogs had gathered in the middle of 
the lane and stood my pony amongst them, and 
everybody began to shout at me. 
Sometimes I would ride to Castle Dargan, where 
lived a brawling squireen, married to one of my 
Middleton cousins, and once I went thither on a 
visit with my cousin George Middleton. It was, I 
dare say, the last household where I could have 
found the reckless Ireland of a hundred years ago in 
final degradation. But I liked the place for the ro- 
mance of its two ruined castles facing one another 
across a little lake, Castle Dargan and Castle Fury. 
The squireen lived in a small house whither his 
family had moved from their castle some time in 
the 18th century, and two old Miss Furys, who let 
lodgings in Sligo, were the last remnants of the breed 
of the other ruin. Once in every year he drove to 
Sligo for the two old women, that they might look 
upon the ancestral stones and remember their gen- 
tility, and he would put his wildest horses into the 
shafts to enjoy their terror. 

He himself, with a reeling imagination, knew not 
what he could be at to find a spur for the heavy 

61 



hours. The first day I came there, he gave my cous- 
in a revolver, (we were upon the high road,) and to 
show it off, or his own shooting, he shot a passing 
chicken ; and half an hour later, when he had 
brought us to the lake's edge under his castle, now 
but the broken corner of a tower with a winding 
stair, he fired at or over an old countryman who 
was walking on the far edge of the lake. The next 
day I heard him settling the matter with the old 
countryman over a bottle of whiskey, and both 
were in good humour. Once he had asked a timid 
aunt of mine if she would like to see his last new pet, 
and thereupon had marched a race-horse in through 
the hall door and round the dining-room table. 
And once she came down to a bare table because he 
had thought it a good joke to open the window and 
let his harriers eat the breakfast. There was a 
current story, too, of his shooting, in the pride of 
his marksmanship, at his own door with a Martini - 
Henry rifle till he had shot the knocker off. At last 
he quarrelled with my great-uncle William Middle- 
ton, and to avenge himself gathered a rabble of wild 
country-lads and mounted them and himself upon 
the most broken-down rascally horses he could lay 
hands on and marched them through Sligo under a 
land-league banner. After that, having neither 
friends nor money, he made off to Australia or to 

62 



Canada. I fished for pike at Castle Dargan and 
shot at birds with a muzzle -loading pistol until 
somebody shot a rabbit and I heard it squeal. 
From that on I would kill nothing but the dumb 
fish. 

XI 

We left Bedford Park for a long thatched house at 
Howth, Co. Dublin. The land war was now at its 
height and our Kildare land, that had been in the 
family for many generations, was slipping from us. 
Rents had fallen more and more, we had to sell to 
pay some charge or mortgage, but my father and 
his tenants parted without ill-will. During the 
worst times an old tenant had under his roof my 
father's shooting-dog and gave it better care than 
the annual payment earned. He had set apart for 
its comfort the best place at the fire ; and if some 
man were in the place when the dog walked into the 
house, the man must needs make room for the dog. 
And a good while after the sale, I can remember my 
father being called upon to settle some dispute be- 
tween this old man and his sons. 
I was now fifteen ; and as he did not want to leave 
his painting my father told me to go to Harcourt 
Street and put myself to school. I found a bleak 
18th century house and a small playing-field full of 
mud and pebbles, fenced by an iron railing from a 

63 



wide 18th century street, but opposite a long 
hoarding and a squalid, ornamental railway sta- 
tion. Here, as I soon found, nobody gave a thought 
to decorum. We worked in a din of voices. We 
began the morning with prayers, but when class 
began the head-master, if he was in the humour, 
would laugh at Church and Clergy. "Let them say 
what they like," he would say, ''but the earth does 
go round the sun." On the other hand there was no 
bullying and I had not thought it possible that boys 
could work so hard. Cricket and football, the col- 
lection of moths and butterflies, though not for- 
bidden, were discouraged. They were for idle boys. 
I did not know, as I used to, the mass of my school- 
fellows ; for we had little life in common outside 
the class-rooms. I had begun to think of my school- 
work as an interruption of my natural history 
studies, but even had I never opened a book not 
in the school course, I could not have learned a 
quarter of my night's work. I had always done 
Euclid easily, making the problems out while the 
other boys were blundering at the blackboard, and 
it had often carried me from the bottom to the top 
of my class ; but these boys had the same natural 
k gift and instead of being in the fourth or fifth book 
were in the modern books at the end of the primer ; 
and in place of a dozen lines of Virgil with a diction - 

64 



ary, I was expected to learn with the help of a crib a 
hundred and fifty lines. The other boys were able 
to learn the translation off, and to remember what 
words of Latin and English corresponded with one 
another, but I, who it may be had tried to find out 
what happened in the parts we had not read, made 
ridiculous mistakes ; and what could 1^, who never 
worked when I was not interested, do with a history 
lesson that was but a column of seventy dates ? I 
was worst of all at literature, for we read Shake- 
speare for his grammar exclusively. 
One day I had a lucky thought. A great many 
lessons were run through in the last hour of the day, 
things we had learnt or should have learnt by 
heart over night, and after not having known one of 
them for weeks, I cut off that hour without any- 
body's leave. I asked the mathematical master to, 
give me a sum to work and nobody said a word. 
My father often interfered, and always with disas- 
ter, to teach me my Latin lesson. "But I have also 
my geography," I would say. "Geography," he 
would reply, "should never be taught. It is not a 
training for the mind. You will pick up all that you 
need, in your general reading." And if it was a 
history lesson, he would say just the same, and 
"Euclid," he would say, "is too easy. It comes 
naturally to the literary imagination. The old idea, 
f 65 



that it is a good training for the mind, was long ago 
refuted." I would know my Latin lesson so that 
it was a nine days' wonder, and for weeks after 
would be told it was scandalous to be so clever and so 
idle. No one knew that I had learnt it in the terror 
that alone could check my wandering mind. I must 
have told on him at some time or other for I re- 
member the head-master saying, "I am going to 
give you an imposition because I cannot get at your 
father to give him one." Sometimes we had essays 
to write ; & though I never got a prize, for the 
essays were judged by hand-writing and spelling I 
caused a measure of scandal. I would be called up 
before some master and asked if I really believed 
such things, and that would make me angry for I 
had written what I had believed all my life, what 
my father had told me, or a memory of the conver- 
sation of his friends. There were other beliefs, but 
they were held by people one did not know, people 
who were vulgar or stupid. I was asked to write an 
essay on "men may rise on stepping-stones of their 
dead selves to higher things." My father read the 
subject to my mother, who had no interest in such 
matters. ''That is the way," he said, "boys are 
made insincere and false to themselves. Ideals 
make the blood thin, and take the human nature 
out of people." He walked up and down the room 

66 



in eloquent indignation, and told me not to write on 
such a subject at all, but upon Shakespeare's lines 
"to thine own self be true, and it must follow as the 
night the day thou canst not then be false to any 
man." At another time, he would denounce the 
idea of duty, and "imagine," he would say, "how 
the right sort of woman would despise a dutiful hus- 
band ; " and he would tell us how much my mother 
would scorn such a thing. Maybe there were people 
among whom such ideas were natural, but they 
were the people with whom one does not dine. All 
he said was, I now believe right, but he should have 
taken me away from school. He would have taught 
me nothing but Greek and Latin, and I would now 
be a properly educated man, and would not have 
to look in useless longing at books that have been, 
through the poor mechanism of translation, the 
builders of my soul, nor faced authority with the 
timidity born of excuse and evasion. Evasion and 
excuse were in the event as wise as the house-build- 
ing instinct of the beaver. 

XII 

My London schoolfellow, the athlete, spent a 
summer with us, but the friendship of boyhood, 
founded upon action and adventure, was drawing 
to an end. He was still my superior in all physical 

67 



activity and climbed to places among the rocks that 
even now are uncomfortable memories, but I had 
begun to criticize him. One morning I proposed a 
journey to Lambay Island, and was contemptuous 
because he said we should miss our mid-day meal. 
We hoisted a sail on our small boat and ran quickly 
over the nine miles and saw on the shore a tame 
sea-gull, while a couple of boys, the sons of a coast- 
guard, ran into the water in their clothes to pull us 
to land, as we had read of savage people doing. We 
spent an hour upon the sunny shore and I said, "I 
would like to live here always, and perhaps some 
day I will." I was always discovering places 
where I would like to spend my whole life. We 
started to row home, and when dinner-time had 
passed for about an hour, the athlete lay down on 
the bottom of the boat doubled up with the gripes. 
I mocked at him and at his fellow-countrymen 
whose stomachs struck the hour as if they were 
clocks. 

Our natural history, too, began to pull us apart. I 
planned some day to write a book about the 
changes through a twelve-month among the crea- 
tures of some hole in the rock, and had some theory 
of my own, which I cannot remember, as to the 
colour of sea-anemones : and after much hesitation, 
trouble and bewilderment, was hot for argument in 

68 



refutation of Adam and Noah and the Seven Days. 
I had read Darwin and Wallace, Huxley and 
Haeckel, and would spend hours on a holiday 
plaguing a pious geologist, who, when not at some job 
in Guinness 's brewery, came with a hammer to look 
for fossils in the Howth Cliffs. "You know," I 
would say, "that such and such human remains 
cannot be less, because of the strata they were 
found in, than fifty thousand years old." "Oh!" 
he would answer, "they are an isolated instance." 
And once when I pressed hard my case against 
Ussher's chronology, he begged me not to speak of 
the subject again. " If I believed what you do," he 
said, "I could not live a moral life." But I could 
not even argue with the athlete who still collected 
his butterflies for the adventure's sake, and with no 
curiosity but for their names. I began to judge his 
intelligence, and to tell him that his natural history 
had as little to do with science as his collection of 
postage stamps. Even during my school days in 
London, influenced perhaps by my father, I had 
looked down upon the postage stamps. 

XIII 

Our house for the first year or so was on the top of 
a cliff, so that in stormy weather the spray would 
sometimes soak my bed at night, for I had taken 

69 



the glass out of the window, sash and all. A literary- 
passion for the open air was to last me for a few 
years. Then for another year or two, we had a 
house overlooking the harbour where the one great 
sight was the going and coming of the fishing fleet. 
We had one regular servant, a fisherman's wife, and 
the occasional help of a big, red-faced girl who ate a 
whole pot of jam while my mother was at church 
and accused me of it. Some such arrangement 
lasted until long after the time I write of, and until 
my father going into the kitchen by chance found a 
girl, who had been engaged during a passing need, 
in tears at the thought of leaving our other servant, 
and promised that they should never be parted. I 
have no doubt that we lived at the harbour for 
my mother's sake. She had, when we were children, 
refused to take us to a seaside place because she 
heard it possessed a bathing box, but she loved the 
activities of a fishing village. When I think of her, I 
almost always see her talking over a cup of tea in 
the kitchen with our servant, the fisherman's wife, 
on the only themes outside our house that seemed 
of interest — the fishing people of Howth, or the 
pilots and fishing people of Rosses Point. She read 
no books, but she and the fisherman's wife would 
tell each other stories that Homer might have told, 
pleased with any moment of sudden intensity and 

70 



laughing together over any point of satire. There 
is an essay called "Village Ghosts" in my "Celtic 
Twilight" which is but a record of one such after- 
noon, and many a fine tale has been lost because it 
had not occurred to me soon enough to keep notes. 
My father was always praising her to my sisters and 
to me, because she pretended to nothing she did not 
feel. She would write him letters telling of her de- 
light in the tumbling clouds, but she did not care 
for pictures, and never went to an exhibition even 
to see a picture of his, nor to his studio to see the 
day's work, neither now nor when they were first 
married. I remember all this very clearly and little 
after until her mind had gone in a stroke of paraly- 
sis and she had found, liberated at last from finan- 
cial worry, perfect happiness feeding the birds at 
a London window. She had always, my father 
would say, intensity, and that was his chief word 
of praise; and once he added to the praise "no 
spendthrift ever had a poet for a son, though a 
miser might." 

XIV 

The great event of a boy's life is the awakening of 
sex. He will bathe many times a day, or get up at 
dawn and having stripped leap to and fro over a 
stick laid upon two chairs and hardly know, and 
never admit, that he had begun to take pleasure in 

71 



his own nakedness, nor will he understand the 
change until some dream discovers it. He may 
never understand at all the greater change in his 
mind. 

It all came upon me when I was close upon seven- 
teen like the bursting of a shell. Somnambulistic 
country-girls, when it is upon them, throw plates 
about or pull them with long hairs in simulation of 
the polter-geist, or become mediums for some gen- 
uine spirit-mischief, surrendering to their desire of 
the marvellous. As I look backward, I seem to dis- 
cover that my passions, my loves and my despairs, 
instead of being my enemies, a disturbance and an 
attack, became so beautiful that I must be con- 
stantly alone to give them my whole attention. I 
notice that, for the first time as I run through 
my memory, what I saw when alone is more vivid 
than what I did or saw in company. 
A herd had shown me a cave some hundred and 
fifty feet below the cliff path and a couple of hun- 
dred above the sea, and told me how an evicted 
tenant called Macrom, dead some fifteen years, had 
lived there many years, and shown me a rusty nail 
in the rock which had served perhaps to hold up 
some wooden protection from wind and weather. 
Here I stored a tin of cocoa and some biscuits, and 
instead of going to my bed, would slip out on warm 

72 



nights and sleep in the cave on the excuse of catch- 
ing moths. One had to pass over a rocky ledge, 
safe enough for anyone with a fair head, yet seem- 
ing, if looked at from above, narrow and sloping ; 
and a remonstrance from a stranger who had seen 
me climbing along it doubled my delight in the ad- 
venture. When however, upon a bank holiday, I 
found lovers in my cave, I was not content with it 
again till I heard of alarm among the fishing boats, 
because the ghost of Macrom had been seen a little 
before the dawn, stooping over his fire in the cave- 
mouth. I had been trying to cook eggs, as I had 
read in some book, by burying them in the earth 
under a fire of sticks. 

At other times, I would sleep among the rhododen- 
drons and rocks in the wilder part of the grounds of 
Howth Castle. After a while my father said I must 
stay in-doors half the night, meaning that I should 
get some sleep in my bed ; but I, knowing that I 
would be too sleepy and comfortable to get up 
again, used to sit over the kitchen fire till half the 
night was gone. Exaggerated accounts spread 
through the school, and sometimes when I did not 
know a lesson some master would banter me. My 
interest in science began to fade away, and pres- 
ently I said to myself, "it has all been a misunder- 
standing." I remembered how soon I tired of my 

73 



specimens, and how little I knew after all my years 
of collecting, and I came to believe that I had gone 
through so much labour because of a text, heard for 
the first time in St. John's Church in Sligo. I 
wanted to be certain of my own wisdom by copying 
Solomon, who had knowledge of hyssop and of tree. 
I still carried my green net but I began to play at 
being a sage, a magician or a poet. I had many 
idols, and now as I climbed along the narrow ledge 
I was Manfred on his glacier, and now I thought of 
Prince At hanase and his solitary lamp, but I soon 
chose Alastor for my chief of men and longed to 
share his melancholy, and maybe at last to disap- 
pear from everybody's sight as he disappeared 
drifting in a boat along some slow-moving river 
between great trees. When I thought of women 
they were modelled on those in my favourite poets 
and loved in brief tragedy, or, like the girl in "The 
Revolt of Islam," accompanied their lovers through 
all manner of wild places, lawless women without 
homes and without children. 

XV 

My father's influence upon my thoughts was at its 
height. We went to Dublin by train every morning, 
breakfasting in his studio. He had taken a large 
room with a beautiful 18th century mantle-piece 

74 



in a York Street tenement house, and at breakfast 
he read passages from the poets, and always from 
the play or poem at its most passionate moment. 
He never read me a passage because of its specula- 
tive interest, and indeed did not care at all for 
poetry where there was generalisation or abstrac- 
tion however impassioned. He would read out the 
first speeches of the Prometheus Unbound, but 
never the ecstatic lyricism of that famous fourth 
act ; and another day the scene where Coriolanus 
comes to the house of Aufidius and tells the impu- 
dent servants that his home is under the canopy. I 
have seen Coriolanus played a number of times 
since then, and read it more than once, but that 
scene is more vivid than the rest, and it is my 
father's voice that I hear and not Irving's or Ben- 
son's. He did not care even for a fine lyric passage 
unless one felt some actual man behind its elaboration 
of beauty, and he was always looking for the linea- 
ments of some desirable, familiar life. When the 
spirits sang their scorn of Manfred I was to judge 
by Manfred's answer "O sweet and melancholy 
voices" that they could not, even in anger, put off 
their spiritual sweetness. He thought Keats a 
greater poet than Shelley, because less abstract, 
but did not read him, caring little, I think, for any 
of that most beautiful poetry which has come in 

75 



modern times from the influence of painting. All 
must be an idealisation of speech, and at some mo- 
ment of passionate action or somnambulistic rev- 
erie. I remember his saying that all contemplative 
men were in a conspiracy to overrate their state of 
life, and that all writers were of them, excepting 
the great poets. Looking backwards, it seems to me 
that I saw his mind in fragments, which had always 
hidden connections I only now begin to discover. 
He disliked the Victorian poetry of ideas, and 
Wordsworth but for certain passages or whole 
poems. He described one morning over his break- 
fast how in the shape of the head of a Words- 
worthian scholar, an old and greatly respected 
clergyman whose portrait he was painting, he had 
discovered all the animal instincts of a prize- 
fighter. He despised the formal beauty of Raphael, 
that calm which is not an ordered passion but an 
hypocrisy, and attacked Raphael's life for its love 
of pleasure and its self-indulgence. In literature 
he was always pre-Raphaelite, and carried into 
literature principles that, while the Academy was 
still unbroken, had made the first attack upon 
academic form. He no longer read me anything for 
its story, and all our discussion was of style. 



76 



XVI 

I began to make blunders when I paid calls or 
visits, and a woman I had known and liked as a 
child told me I had changed for the worse. I had 
wanted to be wise and eloquent, an essay on the 
younger Ampere had helped me to this ambition, 
and when I was alone I exaggerated my blunders 
and was miserable. I had begun to write poetry 
in imitation of Shelley and of Edmund Spenser, 
play after play — for my father exalted dramatic 
poetry above all other kinds — and I invented 
fantastic and incoherent plots. My lines but sel- 
dom scanned, for I could not understand the pros- 
ody in the books, although there were many lines 
that taken by themselves had music. I spoke them 
slowly as I wrote and only discovered when I read 
them to somebody else that there was no common 
music, no prosody. There were, however, moments 
of observation ; for, even when I caught moths no 
longer, I still noticed all that passed ; how the little 
moths came out at sunset, and how after that there 
were only a few big moths till dawn brought little 
moths again ; and what birds cried out at night as if 
in their sleep. 

XVII 

At Sligo, where I still went for my holidays, I stayed 
with my uncle, George Pollexfen, who had come 

77 



from Ballina to fill the place of my grandfather, 
who had retired. My grandfather had no longer 
his big house, his partner William Middleton was 
dead, and there had been legal trouble. He was no 
longer the rich man he had been, and his sons and 
daughters were married and scattered. He had a 
tall, bare house overlooking the harbour, and had 
nothing to do but work himself into a rage if he 
saw a mudlighter mismanaged or judged from the 
smoke of a steamer that she was burning cheap 
coal, and to superintend the making of his tomb. 
There was a Middleton tomb and a long list of 
Middletons on the wall, and an almost empty place 
for Pollexfen names, but he had said, because there 
was a Middleton there he did not like, "I am not 
going to lie with those old bones ; " and already one 
saw his name in large gilt letters on the stone 
fence of the new tomb. He ended his walk at St. 
John's churchyard almost daily, for he liked every- 
thing neat and compendious as upon shipboard, 
and if he had not looked after the tomb himself the 
builder might have added some useless ornament. 
He had, however, all his old skill and nerve. I was 
going to Rosses Point on the little trading steamer 
and saw him take the wheel from the helmsman 
and steer her through a gap in the channel wall, and 
across the sand, an unheard-of-course, and at the 

78 



journey's end bring her alongside her wharf at 
Rosses without the accustomed zigzagging or pull- 
ing on a rope but in a single movement. He took 
snuff when he had a cold, but had never smoked or 
taken alcohol ; and when in his eightieth year his 
doctor advised a stimulant, he replied, "no, no, I 
am not going to form a bad habit." 
My brother had partly taken my place in my grand- 
mother's affections. He had lived permanently 
in her house for some years now, and went to a 
Sligo school where he was always bottom of his 
class. My grandmother did not mind that, for she 
said, "he is too kind-hearted to pass the other 
boys." He spent his free hours going here and there 
with crowds of little boys, sons of pilots and sailors, 
as their well-liked leader, arranging donkey races 
or driving donkeys tandem, an occupation which 
requires all one's intellect because of their obsti- 
nacy. Besides he had begun to amuse everybody 
with his drawings ; and in half the pictures he 
paints to-day I recognise faces that I have met at 
Rosses or the Sligo quays. It is long since he has 
lived there, but his memory seems as accurate as 
the sight of the eye. 

George Pollexfen was as patient as his father was 
impetuous, and did all by habit. A well-to-do, 
elderly man, he lived with no more comfort than 

79 



when he had set out as a young man. He had a 
little house and one old general servant and a man 
to look after his horse, and every year he gave up 
some activity and found that there was one more 
food that disagreed with him. A hypochondriac, he 
passed from winter to summer through a series of 
woollens that had always to be weighed ; for in 
April or May or whatever the date was he had to be 
sure he carried the exact number of ounces he had 
carried upon that date since boyhood. He lived in 
despondency, finding in the most cheerful news 
reasons of discouragement, and sighing every 
twenty-second of June over the shortening of the 
days. Once in later years, when I met him in Dub- 
lin sweating in a midsummer noon, I brought him 
into the hall of the Kildare Street Library, a cool 
and shady place, without lightening his spirits ; 
for he but said in a melancholy voice, ''how very 
cold this place must be in winter time." Some- 
times when I had pitted my cheerfulness against 
his gloom over the breakfast table, maintaining 
that neither his talent nor his memory nor his 
health were running to the dregs, he would rout me 
with the sentence, "how very old I shall be in 
twenty years." Yet this inactive man, in whom the 
sap of life seemed to be dried away, had a mind full 
of pictures. Nothing had ever happened to him ex- 
o 80 



cept a love affair, not I think very passionate, that 
had gone wrong, and a voyage when a young man. 
My grandfather had sent him in a schooner to a 
port in Spain where the shipping agents were two 
Spaniards called O'Neill, descendants of Hugh 
O'Neill, Earl of Tyrone, who had fled from Ireland 
in the reign of James I ; and their Irish trade was a 
last remnant of the Spanish trade that had once 
made Galway wealthy. For some years he and they 
had corresponded, for they cherished the memory of 
their origin. In some Connaught burying ground, 
he had chanced upon the funeral of a child with 
but one mourner, a distinguished foreign-looking 
man. It was an Austrian count burying the last 
of an Irish family, long nobles of Austria, who 
were always carried to that half-ruined burying 
ground. 

My uncle had almost given up hunting and was 
soon to give it up altogether, and he had once 
ridden steeple-chases and been, his horse-trainer 
said, the best rider in Connaught. He had certainly 
great knowledge of horses, for I have been told, 
several counties away, that at Ballina he cured 
horses by conjuring. He had, however, merely 
great skill in diagnosis, for the day was still far off 
when he was to give his nights to astrology and 
ceremonial magic. His servant, Mary Battle, who 

81 



had been with him since he was a young man, had 
the second sight and that, maybe, inclined him to 
strange studies. He would tell how more than once 
when he had brought home a guest without giving 
her notice he had found the dinner-table set for 
two, and one morning she was about to bring him a 
clean shirt, but stopped saying there was blood on 
the shirt-front and that she must bring him 
another. On his way to his office he fell, crossing 
over a little wall, and cut himself and bled on to the 
linen where she had seen the blood. In the evening, 
she told how surprised she had been to find when 
she looked again that the shirt she had thought 
bloody was quite clean. She could neither read nor 
write and her mind, which answered his gloom with 
its merriment, was rammed with every sort of old 
history and strange belief. Much of my "Celtic 
Twilight" is but her daily speech. 
My uncle had the respect of the common people as 
few Sligo men have had it ; he would have thought 
a stronger emotion an intrusion on his privacy. He 
gave to all men the respect due to their station or 
their worth with an added measure of ceremony, 
and kept among his workmen a discipline that had 
about it something of a regiment or a ship, know- 
ing nothing of any but personal authority. If a 
carter, let us say, was in fault, he would not dismiss 

82 



him, but send for him and take his whip away and 
hang it upon the wall ; and having reduced the of- 
fender, as it were, to the ranks for certain months, 
would restore him to his post and his whip. This 
man of diligence and of method, who had no enter- 
prise but in contemplation, and claimed that his 
wealth, considerable for Ireland, came from a 
brother's or partner's talent, was the confidant of 
my boyish freaks and reveries. When I said to him, 
echoing some book I had read, that one never knew 
a countryside till one knew it at night, (though 
nothing would have kept him from his bed a mo- 
ment beyond the hour) he was pleased ; for he 
loved natural things and had learnt two cries of the 
lapwing, one that drew them to where he stood and 
one that made them fly away. And he approved, 
and arranged my meals conveniently, when I told 
him I was going to walk round Lough Gill and sleep 
in a wood. I did not tell him all my object, for I was 
nursing a new ambition. My father had read to 
me some passage out of "Walden," and I planned 
to live some day in a cottage on a little island called 
Innisfree, and Innisfree was opposite Slish Wood 
where I meant to sleep. 

I thought that having conquered bodily desire and 
the inclination of my mind towards women and 
love, I should live, as Thoreau lived, seeking wis- 

83 



dom. There was a story in the county history of a 
tree that had once grown upon that island guarded 
by some terrible monster and borne the food of the 
gods. A young girl pined for the fruit and told her 
lover to kill the monster and carry the fruit away. 
He did as he had been told, but tasted the fruit ; 
and when he reached the mainland where she had 
waited for him, was dying of its powerful virtue. 
And from sorrow and from remorse she too ate of it 
and died. I do not remember whether I chose the 
island because of its beauty or for the story's sake, 
but I was twenty-two or three before I gave up the 
dream. 

I set out from Sligo about six in the evening, walk- 
ing slowly, for it was an evening of great beauty ; 
but though I was well into Slish Wood by bed -time, 
I could not sleep, not from the discomfort of the 
dry rock I had chosen for my bed, but from my fear 
of the wood-ranger. Somebody had told me, though 
I do not think it could have been true, that he went 
his round at some unknown hour. I kept going over 
what I should say if I was found and could not 
think of anything he would believe. However, I 
could watch my island in the early dawn and notice 
the order of the cries of the birds. 
I came home next day unimaginably tired 85 
sleepy, having walked some thirty miles partly over 

84 



rough and boggy ground. For months afterwards, 
if I alluded to my walk, my uncle's general servant 
(not Mary Battle, who was slowly recovering from 
an illness and would not have taken the liberty) 
would go into fits of laughter. She believed I had 
spend the night in a different fashion and had in- 
vented the excuse to deceive my uncle, and would 
say to my great embarrassment, for I was as prud- 
ish as an old maid, "and you had good right to be 
fatigued." 

Once when staying with my uncle at Rosses Point 
where he went for certain months of the year, I 
called upon a cousin towards midnight and asked 
him to get his yacht out, for I wanted to find what 
sea birds began to stir before dawn. He was indig- 
nant and refused ; but his elder sister had over- 
heard me and came to the head of the stairs and 
forbade him to stir, and that so vexed him that 
he shouted to the kitchen for his sea-boots. He 
came with me in great gloom for he had people's re- 
spect, he declared, and nobody so far had said that 
he was mad as they said I was, and we got a very 
sleepy boy out of his bed in the village and set up sail. 
We put a trawl out, as he thought it would restore 
his character if he caught some fish, but the wind 
fell and we were becalmed. I rolled myself in the 
main-sail and went to sleep for I could sleep any- 

85 



where in those days. I was awakened towards 
dawn to see my cousin and the boy turning out 
their pockets for money and to rummage in my own 
pockets. A boat was rowing in from Roughley with 
fish and they wanted to buy some and would pre- 
tend they had caught it, but all our pockets were 
empty. It was for the poem that became fifteen 
years afterwards "The Shadowy Waters" that I 
had wanted the birds' cries, and it had been full of 
observation had I been able to write it when I first 
planned it. I had found again the windy light that 
moved me when a child. I persuaded myself that 
I had a passion for the dawn, and this passion, 
though mainly histrionic like a child's play, an am- 
bitious game, had moments of sincerity. Years 
afterwards when I had finished "The Wanderings 
of Oisin," dissatisfied with its yellow and its dull 
green, with all that overcharged colour inherited 
from the romantic movement, I deliberately re- 
shaped my style, deliberately sought out an im- 
pression as of cold light and tumbling clouds. I cast 
off traditional metaphors and loosened my rhythm, 
and recognizing that all the criticism of life known 
to me was alien and English, became as emotional 
as possible but with an emotion which I described 
to myself as cold. It is a natural conviction for a 
painter's son to believe that there may be a land- 

86 



scape symbolical of some spiritual condition that 
awakens a hunger such as cats feel for valerian. 

XVIII 

I was writing a long play on a fable suggested by 
one of my father's early designs. A king's daughter 
loves a god seen in the luminous sky above her gar- 
den in childhood, and to be worthy of him and put 
away mortality, becomes without pity 85 commits 
crimes, and at last, having made her way to the 
throne by murder, awaits the hour among her 
courtiers. One by one they become chilly and drop 
dead, for, unseen by all but her, her god is walking 
through the hall. At last he is at her throne's foot 
and she, her mind in the garden once again, dies 
babbling like a child. 

XIX 

Once when I was sailing with my cousin, the boy 
who was our crew talked of a music-hall at a neigh- 
bouring seaport, and how the girls there gave them- 
selves to men, and his language was as extrava- 
gant as though he praised that courtezan after 
whom they named a city or the queen of Sheba 
herself. Another day he wanted my cousin to sail 
some fifty miles along the coast and put in near 
some cottages where he had heard there were girls 

87 



"and we would have a great welcome before us." 
He pleaded with excitement (I imagine that his 
eyes shone) but hardly hoped to persuade us, and 
perhaps but played with fabulous images of life and 
of sex. A young jockey and horse-trainer, who had 
trained some horses for my uncle, once talked to me 
of wicked England while we cooked a turkey for our 
Christmas dinner making it twist about on a string 
in front of his harness-room fire. He had met two 
lords in England where he had gone racing, who 
"always exchanged wives when they went to the 
Continent for a holiday." He himself had once 
been led into temptation and was going home with 
a woman, but having touched his scapular by 
chance, saw in a moment an angel waving white 
wings in the air. Presently I was to meet him no 
more and my uncle said he had done something dis- 
graceful about a horse. 

XX 

I was climbing up a hill at Howth when I heard 
wheels behind me and a pony-carriage drew up be- 
side me. A pretty girl was driving alone and with- 
out a hat. She told me her name and said we had 
friends in common and asked me to ride beside her. 
After that I saw a great deal of her and was soon in 
love. I did not tell her I was in love, however, be- 

88 



cause she was engaged. She had chosen me for her 
confidant and I learned all about her quarrels with 
her lover. Several times he broke the engagement 
off, and she would fall ill, and friends would make 
peace. Sometimes she would write to him three 
times a day, but she could not do without a confi- 
dant. She was a wild creature, a fine mimic and 
given to bursts of religion. I have known her to 
weep at a sermon, call herself a sinful woman, and 
mimic it after. I wrote her some bad poems and had 
more than one sleepless night through anger with 
her betrothed. 

XXI 

At Ballisodare an event happened that brought me 
back to the superstitions of my childhood. I do not 
know when it was, for the events of this period have 
as little sequence as those of childhood. I was stay- 
ing with cousins at Avena house, a young man a few 
years older and a girl of my own age and perhaps 
her sister who was a good deal older. My girl cousin 
had often told me of strange sights she had seen at 
Ballisodare or Rosses. An old woman three or four 
feet in height and leaning on a stick had once come 
to the window and looked in at her, and sometimes 
she would meet people on the road who would say 
"how is so-and-so," naming some member of her 
family, and she would know, though she could not 

89 



explain how, that they were not people of this 
world. Once she had lost her way in a familiar field, 
and when she found it again the silver mounting 
on a walking-stick belonging to her brother which 
she carried had vanished. An old woman in the 
village said afterwards ''you have good friends 
amongst them, and the silver was taken instead of 
you." 

Though it was all years ago, what I am going to tell 
now must be accurate, for no great while ago she 
wrote out her unprompted memory of it all and it 
was the same as mine. She was sitting under an 
old-fashioned mirror reading and I was reading in 
another part of the room. Suddenly I heard a 
sound as if somebody was throwing a shower of peas 
at the mirror. I got her to go into the next room 
and rap with her knuckles on the other side of the 
wall to see if the sound could come from there, and 
while I was alone a great thump came close to my 
head upon the wainscot and on a different wall of 
the room. Later in the day a servant heard a heavy 
footstep going through the empty house, and that 
night, when I and my two cousins went for a walk, 
she saw the ground under some trees all in a blaze 
of light. I saw nothing, but presently we crossed 
the river and went along its edge where, they say, 
there was a village destroyed, I think in the wars of 

90 



the 17th century, and near an old grave-yard. 
Suddenly we all saw light moving over the river 
where there is a great rush of waters. It was like a 
very brilliant torch. A moment later the girl saw a 
man coming towards us who disappeared in the 
water. I kept asking myself if I could be deceived. 
Perhaps after all, though it seemed impossible, 
somebody was walking in the water with a torch. 
But we could see a small light low down on Knock- 
na-rea seven miles off, and it began to move upward 
over the mountain slope. I timed it on my watch 
and in five minutes it reached the summit, and I, 
who had often climbed the mountain, knew that 
no human footstep was so speedy. 
From that on I wandered about raths and faery hills 
and questioned old women and old men and, when 
I was tired out or unhappy, began to long for some 
such end as True Thomas found. I did not believe 
with my intellect that you could be carried away 
body and soul, but I believed with my emotions and 
the belief of the country people made that easy. 
Once when I had crawled into the stone passage in 
some rath of the third Rosses, the pilot who had 
come with me called down the passage : "are you 
all right, sir?" 

And one night as I came near the village of Rosses 
on the road from Sligo, a fire blazed up on a green 

91 



bank at my right side seven or eight feet above me, 
and another fire suddenly answered from Knock - 
na-rea. I hurried on doubting, and yet hardly 
doubting in my heart that I saw again the fires that 
I had seen by the river at Ballisodare. I began oc- 
casionally telling people that one should believe 
whatever had been believed in all countries and 
periods, and only reject any part of it after much 
evidence, instead of starting all over afresh and 
only believing what one could prove. But I was al- 
ways ready to deny or turn into a joke what was 
for all that my secret fanaticism. When I had 
read Darwin and Huxley and believed as they did, 
I had wanted, because an established authority was 
upon my side, to argue with everybody. 

XXII 

I no longer went to the Harcourt Street school and 
we had moved from Howth to Rathgar. I was at 
the Arts schools in Kildare Street, but my father, 
who came to the school now and then, was my 
teacher. The masters left me alone, for they liked a 
very smooth surface and a very neat outline, and 
indeed understood nothing but neatness and 
smoothness. A drawing of the Discobolus, after my 
father had touched it, making the shoulder stand 
out with swift and broken lines, had no meaning 

92 



for them ; and for the most part I exaggerated all 
that my father did. Sometimes indeed, out of ri- 
valry to some student near, I too would try to be 
smooth and neat. One day I helped the student 
next me, who certainly had no artistic gifts, to 
make a drawing of some plaster fruit. In his grati- 
tude he told me his history. " I don't care for art," 
he said. " I am a good billiard player, one of the best 
in Dublin ; but my guardian said I must take a pro- 
fession, so I asked my friends to tell me where I 
would not have to pass an examination, and here I 
am." It may be that I myself was there for no better 
reason. My father had wanted me to go to Trinity 
College and, when I would not, had said, "my 
father and grandfather and great-grandfather have 
been there." I did not tell him my reason was that 
I did not believe my classics or my mathematics 
good enough for any examination. 
I had for fellow-student an unhappy "village gen- 
ius" sent to Dublin by some charitable Connaught 
landlord. He painted religious pictures upon sheets 
nailed to the wall of his bedroom, a "Last Judg- 
ment" among the rest. Then there was a wild 
young man who would come to school of a morning 
with a daisy-chain hung round his neck ; and 
George Russel, "iE," the poet, and mystic. He 
did not paint the model as we tried to, for some 

93 



other image rose always before his eyes (a St. John 
in the Desert I remember,) and already he spoke to 
us of his visions. His conversation, so lucid and 
vehement to-day, was all but incomprehensible, 
though now and again some phrase would be under- 
stood and repeated. One day he announced that he 
was leaving the Art schools because his will was 
weak and the arts or any other emotional pursuit 
could but weaken it further. 

Presently I went to the modelling class to be with 
certain elder students who had authority among us. 
Among these were John Hughes and Oliver Shep- 
pard, well-known now as Irish sculptors. The day 
I first went into the studio where they worked, I 
stood still upon the threshold in amazement. A 
pretty gentle-looking girl was modelling in the 
middle of the room, and all the men were swearing 
at her for getting in their light with the most violent 
and fantastic oaths, and calling her every sort of 
name, and through it all she worked in undisturbed 
diligence. Presently the man nearest me saw my 
face and called out, " she is stone deaf, so we always 
swear at her and call her names when she gets in our 
light." In reality I soon found that everyone was 
kind to her, carrying her drawing-boards and the 
like, and putting her into the tram at the day's end. 
We had no scholarship, no critical knowledge of the 

94 



history of painting, and no settled standards. A 
student would show his fellows some French illus- 
trated paper that we might all admire, now some 
statue by Rodin or Dalou and now some declama- 
tory Parisian monument, and if I did not happen 
to have discussed the matter with my father I 
would admire with no more discrimination than 
the rest. That pretentious monument to Gambetta 
made a great stir among us. No influence touched 
us but that of France, where one or two of the older 
students had been already and all hoped to go. Of 
England I alone knew anything. Our ablest stu- 
dent had learnt Italian to read Dante, but had 
never heard of Tennyson or Browning, and it was I 
who carried into the school some knowledge of Eng- 
lish poetry, especially of Browning who had be- 
gun to move me by his air of wisdom. I do not be- 
lieve that I worked well, for I wrote a great deal and 
that tired me, and the work I was set to bored me. 
When alone and uninfluenced, I longed for pattern, 
for pre-Raphaelitism, for an art allied to poetry, 
and returned again and again to our National 
Gallery to gaze at Turner's Golden Bough. Yet I 
was too timid, had I known how, to break away 
from my father's style and the style of those about 
me. I was always hoping that my father would re- 
turn to the style of his youth, and make pictures 

95 



out of certain designs now lost, that one could still 
find in his portfolios. There was one of an old 
hunchback in vague medieval dress, going through 
some underground place where there are beds with 
people in the beds ; a girl half rising from one has 
seized his hand and is kissing it. I have forgotten 
its story, but the strange old man and the intensity 
in the girl's figure are vivid as in my childhood. 
There is some passage, I believe in the Bible, about 
a man who saved a city and went away and was 
never heard of again and here he was in another 
design, an old ragged beggar in the market-place 
laughing at his own statue. But my father would 
say : "I must paint what I see in front of me. Of 
course I shall really paint something different be- 
cause my nature will come in unconsciously." 
Sometimes I would try to argue with him, for I had 
come to think the philosophy of his fellow-artists 
and himself a misunderstanding created by Vic- 
torian science, and science I had grown to hate with 
a monkish hate ; but no good came of it, and in a 
moment I would unsay what I had said and pretend 
that I did not really believe it. My father was 
painting many fine portraits, Dublin leaders of the 
bar, college notabilities, or chance comers whom he 
would paint for nothing if he liked their heads ; but 
all displeased me. In my heart I thought that only 

96 



beautiful things should be painted, and that only 
ancient things and the stuff of dreams were beau- 
tiful. And I almost quarrelled with my father 
when he made a large water-colour, one of his 
finest pictures and now lost, of a consumptive 
beggar girl. And a picture at the Hibernian Acad- 
emy of cocottes with yellow faces sitting before a 
cafe by some follower of Manet's made me miser- 
able for days, but I was happy when partly through 
my father's planning some Whistlers were brought 
over and exhibited, and did not agree when my 
father said: "imagine making your old mother 
an arrangement in gray !" I did not care for mere 
reality and believed that creation should be con- 
scious, and yet I could only imitate my father. I 
could not compose anything but a portrait and even 
to-day I constantly see people as a portrait painter, 
posing them in the mind's eye before such and such 
a background. Meanwhile I was still very much 
of a child, sometimes drawing with an elaborate 
frenzy, simulating what I believed of inspiration 
and sometimes walking with an artificial stride in 
memory of Hamlet and stopping at shop windows 
to look at my tie gathered into a loose sailor-knot 
and to regret that it could not be always blown 
out by the wind like Byron's tie in the picture. I had 
as many ideas as I have now, only I did not know 
H 97 



how to choose from among them those that be- 
longed to my life. 

XXIII 

We lived in a villa where the red bricks were made 
pretentious and vulgar with streaks of slate colour, 
and there seemed to be enemies everywhere. At one 
side indeed there was a friendly architect, but on 
the other some stupid stout woman and her family. 
I had a study with a window opposite some window 
of hers, & one night when I was writing I heard 
voices full of derision and saw the stout woman and 
her family standing in the window. I have a way of 
acting what I write and speaking it aloud without 
knowing what I am doing. Perhaps I was on my 
hands and knees, or looking down over the back of 
a chair talking into what I imagined an abyss. An- 
other day a woman asked me to direct her on her 
way and while I was hesitating, being so suddenly 
called out of my thought, a woman from some 
neighbouring house came by. She said I was a poet 
and my questioner turned away contemptuously. 
Upon the other hand, the policeman and tramway 
conductor thought my absence of mind sufficiently 
explained when our servant told them I was a poet. 
"Oh well," said the policeman, who had been ask- 
ing why I went indifferently through clean and 
muddy places, "if it is only the poetry that is work- 

98 



ing in his head!" I imagine I looked gaunt and 
emaciated, for the little boys at the neighbouring 
cross-road used to say when I passed by : " Oh, here 
is King Death again." One morning when my 
father was on the way to his studio, he met his land- 
lord who had a big grocer's shop and they had this 
conversation : "will you tell me, sir, if you think 
Tennyson should have been given that peerage?" 
"one's only doubt is if he should have accepted it : 
it was a finer thing to be Alfred Tennyson." There 
was a silence, and then: "well, all the people I 
know think he should not have got it." Then, 
spitefully: "what's the good of poetry?" "Oh, it 
gives our minds a great deal of pleasure." "But 
wouldn't it have given your mind more pleasure if 
he had written an improving book ? " " Oh, in that 
case I should not have read it." My father returned 
in the evening delighted with his story, but I could 
not understand how he could take such opinions 
lightly and not have seriously argued with the man. 
None of these people had ever seen any poet but an 
old white-haired man who had written volumes of 
easy, too-honied verse, and run through his money 
and gone clean out of his mind. He was a common 
figure in the streets and lived in some shabby neigh- 
bourhood of tenement houses where there were 
hens and chickens among the cobble stones. Every 

99 



morning he carried home a loaf and gave half of it 
to the hens and chickens, the birds, or to some dog 
or starving cat. He was known to live in one room 
with a nail in the middle of the ceiling from which 
innumerable cords were stretched to other nails in 
the walls. In this way he kept up the illusion that 
he was living under canvas in some Arabian desert. 
I could not escape like this old man from house 
and neighbourhood, but hated both, hearing every 
whisper, noticing every passing glance. 
When my grandfather came for a few days to see a 
doctor, I was shocked to see him in our house. My 
father read out to him in the evening Clark Rus- 
sell's " Wreck of the Grosvenor;" but the doctor 
forbade it, for my grandfather got up in the middle 
of the night and acted through the mutiny, as I 
acted my verse, saying the while, "yes, yes, that is 
the way it would all happen." 

XXIV 

From our first arrival in Dublin, my father had 
brought me from time to time to see Edward Dow- 
den. He and my father had been college friends and 
were trying, perhaps, to take up again their old 
friendship. Sometimes we were asked to breakfast, 
and afterwards my father would tell me to read out 
one of my poems. Dowden was wise in his encour- 

100 



agement, never overpraising and never unsympa- 
thetic, and he would sometimes lend me books. 
The orderly, prosperous house where all was in 
good taste, where poetry was rightly valued, made 
Dublin tolerable for a while, and for perhaps a 
couple of years he was an image of romance. My 
father would not share my enthusiasm and soon, 
I noticed, grew impatient at these meetings. He 
would sometimes say that he had wanted Dowden 
when they were young to give himself to creative 
art, and would talk of what he considered Dowden's 
failure in life. I know now that he was finding in his 
friend what he himself had been saved from by the 
conversation of the pre-Raphaelites. "He will not 
trust his nature," he would say, or "he is too much 
influenced by his inferiors," or he would praise " Re- 
nunciants," one of Dowden's poems, to prove what 
Dowden might have written. I was not influenced 
for I had imagined a past worthy of that dark, ro- 
mantic face. I took literally his verses, touched 
here and there with Swinburnian rhetoric, and be- 
lieved that he had loved, unhappily and illicitly ; 
and when through the practice of my art I dis- 
covered that certain images about the love of woman 
were the properties of a school, I but changed my 
fancy and thought of him as very wise. 
I was constantly troubled about philosophic ques- 

101 



tions. I would say to my fellow students at the Art 
school, "poetry and sculpture exist to keep our 
passions alive;" and somebody would say, "we 
would be much better without our passions." Or I 
would have a week's anxiety over the problem : do 
the arts make us happier, or more sensitive and 
therefore more unhappy. And I would say to 
Hughes or Sheppard, "if I cannot be certain they 
make us happier I will never write again." If I 
spoke of these things to Dowden he would put 
the question away with good-humoured irony : he 
seemed to condescend to everybody and every- 
thing and was now my sage. I was about to learn 
that if a man is to write lyric poetry he must be 
shaped by nature and art to some one out of half-a- 
dozen traditional poses, and be lover or saint, sage 
or sensualist, or mere mocker of all life ; and that 
none but that stroke of luckless luck can open be- 
fore him the accumulated expression of the world. 
And this thought before it could be knowledge was 
an instinct. 

I was vexed when my father called Dowden's irony 
timidity, but after many years his impression has 
not changed for he wrote to me but a few months 
ago, "it was like talking to a priest. One had to be 
careful not to remind him of his sacrifice." Once 
after breakfast Dowden read us some chapters of 

102 



the unpublished "Life of Shelley," and I who had 
made the "Prometheus Unbound" my sacred book 
was delighted with all he read. I was chilled, how- 
ever, when he explained that he had lost his liking 
for Shelley and would not have written it but for an 
old promise to the Shelley family. When it was 
published, Matthew Arnold made sport of certain 
conventionalities and extravagances that were, my 
father and I had come to see, the violence or clumsi- 
ness of a conscientious man hiding from himself a 
lack of sympathy. He had abandoned too, or was 
about to abandon, what was to have been his 
master-work, "The Life of Goethe," though in his 
youth a lecture course at Alexandra College that 
spoke too openly of Goethe's loves had brought 
upon him the displeasure of our Protestant Arch- 
bishop of Dublin. Only Wordsworth, he said, kept, 
more than all, his early love. 

Though my faith was shaken, it was only when he 
urged me to read George Eliot that I became angry 
and disillusioned & worked myself into a quarrel or 
half -quarrel. I had read all Victor Hugo's romances 
and a couple of Balzac's and was in no mind to like 
her. She seemed to have a distrust or a distaste for 
all in life that gives one a springing foot. Then too 
she knew so well how to enforce her distaste by the 
authority of her mid-Victorian science or by some 

103 



habit of mind of its breeding, that I, who had not 
escaped the fascination of what I loathed, doubted 
while the book lay open whatsoever my instinct 
knew of splendour. She disturbed me and alarmed 
me, but when I spoke of her to my father, he threw 
her aside with a phrase, "Oh, she was an ugly 
woman who hated handsome men and handsome 
women;" and he began to praise "Wuthering 
Heights." 

Only the other day, when I got Dowden's letters, 
did I discover for how many years the friendship 
between Dowden and my father had been an antag- 
onism. My father had written from Fitzroy Road 
in the sixties that the brotherhood, by which he 
meant the poet Edwin Ellis, Nettleship and him- 
self, "abhorred Wordsworth;" and Dowden, not 
remembering that another week would bring a dif- 
ferent mood and abhorrence, had written a pained 
and solemn letter. My father had answered that 
Dowden believed too much in the intellect and that 
all valuable education was but a stirring up of the 
emotions and had added that this did not mean ex- 
citability. "In the completely emotional man," he 
wrote, " the least awakening of feeling is a harmony 
in which every chord of every feeling vibrates. 
Excitement is the feature of an insufficiently emo- 
tional nature, the harsh vibrating discourse of but 

104 



one or two chords." Living in a free world ac- 
customed to the gay exaggeration of the talk of 
equals, of men who talk and write to discover truth 
and not for popular instruction, he had already, 
when both men were in their twenties, decided it is 
plain that Dowden was a Provincial. 

XXV 

It was only when I began to study psychical re- 
search and mystical philosophy that I broke away 
from my father's influence. He had been a follower 
of John Stuart Mill and had grown to manhood 
with the scientific movement. In this he had never 
been of Rossetti's party who said that it mattered 
to nobody whether the sun went round the earth 
or the earth round the sun. But through this new 
research, this reaction from popular science, I had 
begun to feel that I had allies for my secret thought. 
Once when I was in Dowden's drawing-room a ser- 
vant announced my late head-master. I must have 
got pale or red, for Dowden, with some ironical, 
friendly remark, brought me into another room and 
there I stayed until the visitor was gone. A few 
months later, when I met the head-master again I 
had more courage. We chanced upon one another 
in the street and he said, "I want you to use your 
influence with so-and-so, for he is giving all his time 

105 



to some sort of mysticism and he will fail in his ex- 
amination." I was in great alarm, but I managed to 
say something about the children of this world 
being wiser than the children of light. He went off 
with a brusque "good morning." I do not think 
that even at that age I would have been so grandilo- 
quent but for my alarm. He had, however, aroused 
all my indignation. 

My new allies and my old had alike sustained me. 
"Intermediate examinations," which I had always 
refused, meant money for pupil and for teacher, and 
that alone. My father had brought me up never 
when at school to think of the future or of any prac- 
tical result. I have even known him to say, "when I 
was young, the definition of a gentleman was a man 
not wholly occupied in getting on." And yet this 
master wanted to withdraw my friend from the pur- 
suit of the most important of all the truths. My 
friend, now in his last year at school, was a show boy, 
and had beaten all Ireland again and again, but 
now he and I were reading Baron Reichenbach on 
Odic Force and manuals published by the Theo- 
sophical Society. We spent a good deal of time in 
the Kildare Street Museum passing our hands over 
the glass cases, feeling or believing we felt the Odic 
Force flowing from the big crystals. We also found 
pins blindfolded and read papers on our discoveries 

106 



to the Hermetic Society that met near the roof in 
York Street. I had, when we first made our society, 
proposed for our consideration that whatever the 
great poets had affirmed in their finest moments 
was the nearest we could come to an authoritative 
religion, and that their mythology, their spirits of 
water and wind were but literal truth. I had read 
"Prometheus Unbound" with this thought in mind 
and wanted help to carry my study through all 
literature. I was soon to vex my father by defining 
truth as "the dramatically appropriate utterance 
of the highest man." And if I had been asked to 
define the "highest" man, I would have said per- 
haps, "we can but find him as Homer found Odys- 
seus when he was looking for a theme." 
My friend had written to some missionary society 
to send him to the South Seas, when I offered him 
Renan's "Life of Christ" and a copy of "Esoteric 
Buddhism." He refused both, but a few days later 
while reading for an examination in Kildare Street 
Library, he asked in an idle moment for "Esoteric 
Buddhism " and came out an esoteric Buddhist. He 
wrote to the missionaries withdrawing his letter and 
offered himself to the Theosophical Society as a 
chela. He was vexed now at my lack of zeal, for I 
had stayed somewhere between the books, held 
there perhaps by my father's scepticism. I said, 

107 



and he thought it was a great joke though I was 
serious, that even if I were certain in my own mind, 
I did not know "a single person with a talent for 
conviction." For a time he made me ashamed of 
my world and its lack of zeal, and I wondered if his 
world (his father was a notorious Orange leader) 
where everything was a matter of belief was not bet- 
ter than mine. He himself proposed the immediate 
conversion of the other show boy, a clever little 
fellow, now a Dublin mathematician and still under 
five feet. I found him a day later in much depres- 
sion. I said, "did he refuse to listen to you?" 
"Not at all," was the answer, "for I had only been 
talking for a quarter of an hour when he said he 
believed." Certainly those minds, parched by 
many examinations, were thirsty. 
Sometimes a professor of Oriental Languages at 
Trinity College, a Persian, came to our Society and 
talked of the magicians of the East. When he was a 
little boy, he had seen a vision in a pool of ink, a 
multitude of spirits singing in Arabic, "woe unto 
those that do not believe in us." And we persuaded 
a Brahmin philosopher to come from London and 
stay for a few days with the only one among us who 
had rooms of his own. It was my first meeting with 
a philosophy that confirmed my vague speculations 
and seemed at once logical and boundless. Con- 

108 



sciousness, he taught, does not merely spread out 
its surface but has, in vision and in contemplation, an- 
other motion and can change in height and in depth. 
A handsome young man with the typical face of 
Christ, he chaffed me good-humouredly because he 
said I came at breakfast and began some question 
that was interrupted by the first caller, waited in 
silence till ten or eleven at night when the last caller 
had gone, and finished my question. 

XXVI 

I thought a great deal about the system of education 
from which I had suffered, and believing that every- 
body had a philosophical defence for all they did, 
I desired greatly to meet some school-master that I 
might question him. For a moment it seemed as if I 
should have my desire. I had been invited to read 
out a poem called "The Island of Statues," an ar- 
cadian play in imitation of Edmund Spenser, to a 
gathering of critics who were to decide whether it 
was worthy of publication in the College magazine. 
The magazine had already published a lyric of 
mine, the first ever printed, and people began to 
know my name. We met in the rooms of Mr. C. H. 
Oldham, now professor of Political Economy at our 
new University ; and though Professor Bury, then a 
very young man, was to be the deciding voice, Mr. 

109 



Oldham had asked quite a large audience. When 
the reading was over and the poem had been ap- 
proved I was left alone, why I cannot remember, 
with a young man who was, I had been told, a 
school -master. I was silent, gathering my courage, 
and he also was silent ; and presently I said without 
anything to lead up to it, "I know you will defend 
the ordinary system of education by saying that it 
strengthens the will, but I am convinced that it 
only seems to do so because it weakens the im- 
pulses." Then I stopped, overtaken by shyness. 
He made no answer but smiled and looked sur- 
prised as though I had said, "you will say they are 
Persian attire ; but let them be changed." 

XXVII 

I had begun to frequent a club founded by Mr. Old- 
ham, and not from natural liking, but from a secret 
ambition. I wished to become self-possessed, to be 
able to play with hostile minds as Hamlet played, 
to look in the lion's face, as it were, with unquiver- 
ing eyelash. In Ireland harsh argument which had 
gone out of fashion in England was still the manner 
of our conversation, and at this club Unionist and 
Nationalist could interrupt one another and insult 
one another without the formal and traditional 
restraint of public speech. Sometimes they would 

110 



change the subject & discuss Socialism, or a philo- 
sophical question, merely to discover their old pas- 
sions under a new shape. I spoke easily and I 
thought well till some one was rude and then I 
would become silent or exaggerate my opinion to 
absurdity, or hesitate and grow confused, or be 
carried away myself by some party passion. I 
would spend hours afterwards going over my words 
and putting the wrong ones right. Discovering 
that I was only self-possessed with people I knew 
intimately, I would often go to a strange house 
where I knew I would spend a wretched hour for 
schooling sake. I did not discover that Hamlet 
had his self-possession from no schooling but from 
indifference and passion conquering sweetness, and 
that less heroic minds can but hope it from old age. 

XXVIII 

I had very little money and one day the toll -taker at 
the metal bridge over the Liffey and a gossip of his 
laughed when I refused the halfpenny and said "no, 
I will go round by O'Connell Bridge." When I 
called for the first time at a house in Leinster Road 
several middle-aged women were playing cards and 
suggested my taking a hand and gave me a glass of 
sherry. The sherry went to my head and I was im- 
poverished for days by the loss of sixpence. My 

111 



hostess was Ellen O'Leary, who kept house for her 
brother John O'Leary the Fenian, the handsomest 
old man I had ever seen. He had been condemned 
to twenty years penal servitude but had been set 
free after five on condition that he did not return to 
Ireland for fifteen years. He had said to the govern- 
ment, " I will not return if Germany makes war on 
you, but I will return if France does." He and his 
old sister lived exactly opposite the Orange leader 
for whom he had a great respect. His sister stirred 
my affection at first for no better reason than her 
likeness of face and figure to the matron of my 
London school, a friendly person, but when I came 
to know her I found sister and brother alike were of 
Plutarch's people. She told me of her brother's 
life, how in his youth as now in his age, he would 
spend his afternoons searching for rare books 
among second-hand book-shops, how the Fenian 
organizer James Stephens had found him there and 
asked for his help. " I do not think you have any 
chance of success," he had said, "but if you never 
ask me to enroll anybody else I will join, it will be 
very good for the morals of the country." She told 
me how it grew to be a formidable movement, and 
of the arrests that followed (I believe that her 
own sweetheart had somehow fallen among the 
wreckage,) of sentences of death pronounced upon 

112 



false evidence amid a public panic, and told it all 
without bitterness. No fanaticism could thrive 
amid such gentleness. She never found it hard to 
believe that an opponent had as high a motive as 
her own and needed upon her difficult road no spur 
of hate. 

Her brother seemed very unlike on a first hearing 
for he had some violent oaths, " Good God in Heav- 
en" being one of them; and if he disliked any- 
thing one said or did, he spoke all his thought, but 
in a little one heard his justice match her charity. 
"Never has there been a cause so bad," he would 
say, "that it has not been defended by good men 
for good reasons." Nor would he overvalue any 
man because they shared opinions ; and when he 
lent me the poems of Davis and the Young Ire- 
landers, of whom I had known nothing, he did not, 
although the poems of Davis had made him a 
patriot, claim that they were very good poetry. 
His room was full of books, always second-hand 
copies that had often been ugly and badly printed 
when new and had not grown to my unhistoric 
mind more pleasing from the dirt of some old Dub- 
lin book-shop. Great numbers were Irish, and for 
the first time I began to read histories and verses 
that a Catholic Irishman knows from boyhood. 
He seemed to consider politics almost wholly as a 
i 113 



moral discipline, and seldom said of any proposed 
course of action that it was practical or otherwise. 
When he spoke to me of his prison life he spoke of 
all with seeming freedom, but presently one noticed 
that he never spoke of hardship and if one asked 
him why, he would say, " I was in the hands of my 
enemies, why should I complain?" I have heard 
since that the governor of his jail found out that 
he had endured some unnecessary discomfort for 
months and had asked why he did not speak of it. 
" I did not come here to complain," was the answer. 
He had the moral genius that moves all young 
people and moves them the more if they are re- 
pelled by those who have strict opinions and yet 
have lived commonplace lives. I had begun, as 
would any other of my training, to say violent and 
paradoxical things to shock provincial sobriety, and 
Dowden's ironical calm had come to seem but a 
professional pose. But here was something as spon- 
taneous as the life of an artist. Sometimes he would 
say things that would have sounded well in some 
heroic Elizabethan play. It became my delight to 
rouse him to these outbursts for I was the poet in 
the presence of his theme. Once when I was de- 
fending an Irish politician who had made a great 
outcry because he was treated as a common felon, 
by showing that he did it for the cause's sake, he 

114 



said, " there are things that a man must not do even 
to save a nation." He would speak a sentence like 
that in ignorance of its passionate value, and would 
forget it the moment after. 

I met at his house friends of later life, Katharine 
Tynan who still lived upon her father's farm, and 
Dr. Hyde, still a college student who took snuff like 
those Mayo county people, whose stories and songs 
he was writing down. "Davitt wants followers by 
the thousand," O'Leary would say, "I only want 
half-a-dozen." One constant caller looked at me 
with much hostility, John F. Taylor, an obscure 
great orator. The other day in Dublin I overheard 
a man murmuring to another one of his speeches as 
I might some Elizabethan lyric that is in my very 
bones. It was delivered at some Dublin debate, 
some College society perhaps. The Lord Chancellor 
had spoken with balanced unemotional sentences 
now self-complacent, now in derision. Taylor be- 
gan hesitating and stopping for words, but after 
speaking very badly for a little, straightened his 
figure and spoke as out of a dream : "I am carried 
to another age, a nobler court, and another Lord 
Chancellor is speaking. I am at the court of the 
first Pharaoh. " Thereupon he put into the mouth of 
that Egyptian all his audience had listened to, but 
now it was spoken to the children of Israel. " If you 

115 



have any spirituality as you boast, why not use our 
great empire to spread it through the world, why 
still cling to that beggarly nationality of yours? 
what are its history and its works weighed with 
those of Egypt." Then his voice changed and sank : 
" I see a man at the edge of the crowd ; he is stand- 
ing listening there, but he will not obey ;" and then 
with his voice rising to a cry, "had he obeyed he 
would never have come down the mountain 
carrying in his arms the tables of the Law in the 
language of the outlaw." 

He had been in a linen-draper's shop for a while, 
had educated himself and put himself to college, 
and was now, as a lawyer, famous for hopeless cases 
where unsure judgment could not make things 
worse, and eloquence, power of cross-examination 
and learning might amend all. Conversation with 
him was always argument, and for an obstinate 
opponent he had such phrases as, "have you your 
head in a bag, sir?" and I seemed his particular 
aversion. As with many of the self-made men of 
that generation, Carlyle was his chief literary 
enthusiasm, supporting him, as he believed, in his 
contempt for the complexities and refinements 
he had not found in his hard life, and I belonged to 
a generation that had begun to call Carlyle rheto- 
rician and demagogue. I had once seen what I had 

116 



believed to be an enraged bull in a field and had 
walked up to it as a test of courage to discover, just 
as panic fell upon me, that it was merely an irritable 
cow. I braved Taylor again and again, but always 
found him worse than my expectation. I would 
say, quoting Mill, ''oratory is heard, poetry is over- 
heard." And he would answer, his voice full of con- 
tempt, that there was always an audience ; and yet, 
in his moments of lofty speech, he himself was alone 
no matter what the crowd. 

At other times his science or his Catholic ortho- 
doxy, I never could discover which, would become 
enraged with my supernaturalism. I can but once 
remember escaping him unabashed and uncon- 
quered. I said with deliberate exaggeration at some 
evening party at O'Leary's "five out of every six 
people have seen a ghost ;" and Taylor fell into my 
net with "well, I will ask everybody here." I man- 
aged that the first answer should come from a man 
who had heard a voice he believed to be that of his 
dead brother, and the second from a doctor's wife 
who had lived in a haunted house and met a man 
with his throat cut, whose throat as he drifted along 
the garden-walk "had opened and closed like the 
mouth of a fish." Taylor threw up his head like an 
angry horse, but asked no further question, and did 
not return to the subject that evening. If he had 

117 



gone on he would have heard from everybody some 
like story though not all at first hand, and Miss 
O'Leary would have told him what happened at 
the death of one of the MacManus brothers, well 
known in the politics of Young Ireland. One 
brother was watching by the bed where the other 
lay dying and saw a strange hawk-like bird fly 
through the open window and alight upon the 
breast of the dying man. He did not dare to drive it 
away and it remained there, as it seemed, looking 
into his brother's eyes until death came, and then 
it flew out of the window. I think, though I am not 
sure, that she had the story from the watcher him- 
self. 

It was understood that Taylor's temper kept him 
from public life, though he may have been the 
greatest orator of his time, partly because no 
leader would accept him, and still more because, 
in the words of one of his Dublin enemies, "he had 
never joined any party and as soon as one joined 
him he seceded." With O'Leary he was always, 
even when they differed, as they often did, gentle 
and deferential, but once only, and that was years 
afterwards, did I think that he was about to include 
me among his friends. We met by chance in a Lon- 
don street and he stopped me with an abrupt move- 
ment : "Yeats," he said, "I have been thinking. 

118 



If you and . . . (naming another aversion,) were 
born in a small Italian principality in the Middle 
Ages, he would have friends at court and you would 
be in exile with a price on your head." He went off 
without another word, and the next time we met 
he was no less offensive than before. He, im- 
prisoned in himself, and not the always unper- 
turbed O'Leary, comes before me as the tragic figure 
of my youth. The same passion for all moral and 
physical splendour that drew him to O'Leary would 
make him beg leave to wear, for some few days, a 
friend's ring or pin, and gave him a heart that every 
pretty woman set on fire. I doubt if he was happy 
in his loves ; for those his powerful intellect had 
fascinated were, I believe, repelled by his coarse red 
hair, his gaunt ungainly body, his stiff movements 
as of a Dutch doll, his badly rolled, shabby um- 
brella. And yet with women, as with O'Leary, he 
was gentle, deferential, almost diffident. 
A Young Ireland Society met in the lecture hall of 
a workman's club in York Street with O'Leary for 
president, and there four or five university students 
and myself and occasionally Taylor spoke on Irish 
history or literature. When Taylor spoke, it was a 
great event, and his delivery in the course of a 
speech or lecture of some political verse by Thomas 
Davis gave me a conviction of how great might be 

119 



the effect of verse spoken by a man almost rhythm- 
drunk at some moment of intensity, the apex of 
long mounting thought. Verses that seemed when 
one saw them upon the page flat and empty 
caught from that voice, whose beauty was half in 
its harsh strangeness, nobility and style. My father 
had always read verse with an equal intensity and 
a greater subtlety, but this art was public and his 
private, and it is Taylor's voice that rings in my 
ears and awakens my longing when I have heard 
some player speak lines, "so naturally," as a 
famous player said to me, "that nobody can find 
out that it is verse at all." I made a good many 
speeches, more I believe as a training for self- 
possession than from desire of speech. 
Once our debates roused a passion that came to the 
newspapers and the streets. There was an excitable 
man who had fought for the Pope against the Italian 
patriots and who always rode a white horse in our 
Nationalist processions. He got on badly with 
O'Leary who had told him that "attempting to op- 
press others was a poor preparation for liberating 
your own country." O'Leary had written some 
letter to the press condemning the " Irish -American 
Dynamite Party" as it was called, and defining the 
limits of "honourable warfare." At the next meet- 
ing, the papal soldier rose in the middle of the dis- 

120 



cussion on some other matter and moved a vote of 
censure on O'Leary. "I myself" he said "do not 
approve of bombs, but I do not think that any 
Irishman should be discouraged." O'Leary ruled 
him out of order. He refused to obey and remained 
standing. Those round him began to threaten. He 
swung the chair he had been sitting on round his 
head and defied everybody. However he was seized 
from all sides and thrown out, and a special meeting 
called to expel him. He wrote letters to the papers 
and addressed a crowd somewhere. "No Young 
Ireland Society," he protested, "could expel a man 
whose grandfather had been hanged in 1798." 
When the night of the special meeting came his 
expulsion was moved, but before the vote could 
be taken an excited man announced that there was 
a crowd in the street, that the papal soldier was 
making a speech, that in a moment we should be 
attacked. Three or four of us ran and put our backs 
to the door while others carried on the debate. It 
was an inner door with narrow glass windows at 
each side and through these we could see the street- 
door and the crowd in the street. Presently a man 
asked us through the crack in the door if we would 
as a favour "leave the crowd to the workman's club 
upstairs." In a couple of minutes there was a great 
noise of sticks and broken glass, and after that our 

121 



landlord came to find out who was to pay for the 
hall -lamp. 

XXIX 

From these debates, from O'Leary's conversation, 
and from the Irish books he lent or gave me has 
come all I have set my hand to since. I had begun 
to know a great deal about the Irish poets who had 
written in English. I read with excitement books I 
should find unreadable to-day, and found romance 
in lives that had neither wit nor adventure. I did 
not deceive myself, I knew how often they wrote a 
cold and abstract language, and yet I who had 
never wanted to see the houses where Keats and 
Shelley lived would ask everybody what sort of 
place Inchedony was, because Callanan had named 
after it a bad poem in the manner of "Childe 
Harold." Walking home from a debate, I remem- 
ber saying to some college student "Ireland cannot 
put from her the habits learned from her old mili- 
tary civilization and from a church that prays in 
Latin. Those popular poets have not touched her 
heart, her poetry when it comes will be distin- 
guished and lonely." O'Leary had once said to me, 
"neither Ireland nor England knows the good from 
the bad in any art, but Ireland unlike England does 
not hate the good when it is pointed out to her." I 
began to plot and scheme how one might seal with 

122 



the right image the soft wax before it began to 
harden. I had noticed that Irish Catholics among 
whom had been born so many political martyrs had 
not the good taste, the household courtesy and 
decency of the Protestant Ireland I had known, and 
yet Protestant Ireland had begun to think of noth- 
ing but getting on. I thought we might bring the 
halves together if we had a national literature that 
made Ireland beautiful in the memory, and yet had 
been freed from provincialism by an exacting criti- 
cism, an European pose. It was because of this 
dream when we returned to London that I made 
with pastels upon the ceiling of my study a map of 
Sligo decorated like some old map with a ship and 
an elaborate compass and wrote, a little against the 
grain, a couple of Sligo stories, one a vague echo of 
"Grettir the Strong," which my father had read to 
me in childhood, and finished with better heart my 
"Wanderings of Oisin," and began after ridding my 
style of romantic colour "The Countess Cathleen." 
I saw that our people did not read, but that they 
listened patiently (how many long political 
speeches have they listened to ?) and saw that there 
must be a theatre, and if I could find the right musi- 
cians, words set to music. I foresaw a great deal 
that we are doing now, though never the appetite of 
our new middle-class for "realism," nor the great - 

123 



ness of the opposition, nor the slowness of the vic- 
tory. Davis had done so much in the four years of 
his working life, I had thought all needful pamphlet- 
eering and speech-making could be run through at 
the day's end, not knowing that taste is so much 
more deeply rooted than opinion that even if one 
had school and newspaper to help, one could 
scarcely stir it under two generations. Then too, 
bred up in a studio where all things are discussed 
and where I had even been told that indiscretion 
and energy are inseparable, I knew nothing of the 
conservatism or of the suspicions of piety. I had 
planned a drama like that of Greece, and romances 
that were, it may be, half Hugo and half de la 
Motte Fouque, to bring into the town the memories 
and visions of the country and to spread every- 
where the history and legends of mediaeval Ireland 
and to fill Ireland once more with sacred places. I 
even planned out, and in some detail, (for those 
mysterious lights and voices were never long for- 
gotten,) another Samothrace, a new Eleusis. I be- 
lieved, so great was my faith, or so deceptive the 
precedent of Young Ireland, that I should find 
men of genius everywhere. I had not the convic- 
tion, as it may seem, that a people can be compelled 
to write what one pleases, for that could but end in 
rhetoric or in some educational movement but be- 

124 



lieved I had divined the soul of the people and had 

set my shoes upon a road that would be crowded 

presently. 

XXX 

Someone at the Young Ireland Society gave me a 
newspaper that I might read some article or letter. 
I began idly reading verses describing the shore of 
Ireland as seen by a returning, dying emigrant. 
My eyes rilled with tears and yet I knew the verses 
were badly written — vague, abstract words such 
as one finds in a newspaper. I looked at the end and 
saw the name of some political exile who had died 
but a few days after his return to Ireland. They 
had moved me because they contained the actual 
thoughts of a man at a passionate moment of life, 
and when I met my father I was full of the dis- 
covery. We should write out our own thoughts in 
as nearly as possible the language we thought them 
in, as though in a letter to an intimate friend. We 
should not disguise them in any way ; for our lives 
give them force as the lives of people in plays give 
force to their words. Personal utterance, which had 
almost ceased in English literature, could be as fine 
an escape from rhetoric and abstraction as drama 
itself. My father was indignant, almost violent, 
and would hear of nothing but drama. "Personal 
utterance was only egotism." I knew it was not, 

125 



but as yet did not know how to explain the differ- 
ence. I tried from that on to write out of my emo- 
tions exactly as they came to me in life, not chang- 
ing them to make them more beautiful, and to rid 
my syntax of all inversions and my vocabulary of 
literary words, and that made it hard to write at 
all. It meant rejecting the words or the construc- 
tions that had been used over and over because 
they flow most easily into rhyme and measure. 
Then, too, how hard it was to be sincere, not to 
make the emotion more beautiful and more violent 
or the circumstance more romantic. "If I can be 
sincere and make my language natural, and with- 
out becoming discursive, like a novelist, and so in- 
discreet and prosaic," I said to myself, "I shall, if 
good luck or bad luck make my life interesting, be a 
great poet ; for it will be no longer a matter of liter- 
ature at all." Yet when I re-read those early poems 
which gave me so much trouble, I find little but ro- 
mantic convention, unconscious drama. It is so 
many years before one can believe enough in what 
one feels even to know what the feeling is. 

XXXI 

Perhaps a year before we returned to London, a 
Catholic friend brought me to a spiritualistic seance 
at the house of a young man who had been lately ar- 

126 



rested under a suspicion of Fenianism, but had been 
released for lack of evidence. He and his friends 
had been sitting weekly about a table in the hope 
of spiritual manifestation and one had developed 
mediumship. A drawer full of books had leaped out 
of the table when no one was touching it, a picture 
had moved upon the wall. There were some half 
dozen of us, and our host began by making passes 
until the medium fell asleep sitting upright in his 
chair. Then the lights were turned out, and we sat 
waiting in the dim light of a fire. Presently my 
shoulders began to twitch and my hands. I could 
easily have stopped them, but I had never heard of 
such a thing and I was curious. After a few minutes 
the movement became violent and I stopped it. I 
sat motionless for a while and then my whole body 
moved like a suddenly unrolled watch-spring, and 
I was thrown backward on the wall. I again stilled 
the movement and sat at the table. Everybody be- 
gan to say I was a medium, and that if I would not 
resist some wonderful thing would happen. I re- 
membered that my father had told me that Balzac 
had once desired to take opium for the experience 
sake, but would not because he dreaded the sur- 
render of his will. We were now holding each 
other's hands and presently my right hand banged 
the knuckles of the woman next to me upon the 

127 



table. She laughed, and the medium, speaking for 
the first time, and with difficulty, out of his mes- 
meric sleep, said, "tell her there is great danger." 
He stood up and began walking round me, making 
movements with his hands as though he were push- 
ing something away. I was now struggling vainly 
with this force which compelled me to movements 
I had not willed, and my movements had become 
so violent that the table was broken. I tried to 
pray, and because I could not remember a prayer, 
repeated in a loud voice 

Of Man's first disobedience and the fruit 
Of that forbidden tree whose mortal taste 
Brought death into the world and all our woe . . • 
Sing, heavenly muse. 

My Catholic friend had left the table and was say- 
ing a Pater Noster and Ave Maria in the corner. 
Presently all became still and so dark that I could 
not see anybody. I described it to somebody next 
day as like going out of a noisy political meeting on 
to a quiet country road. I said to myself, "I am 
now in a trance but I no longer have any desire to 
resist." But when I turned my eyes to the fireplace 
I could see a faint gleam of light, so I thought "no, 
I am not in a trance." Then I saw shapes faintly 
appearing in the darkness & thought, "they are 

128 



spirits;" but they were only the spiritualists and 
my friend at her prayers. The medium said in a 
faint voice, " weare through the bad spirits." I said, 
"will they ever come again, do you think ?" and he 
said, "no, never again, I think," and in my boyish 
vanity I thought it was I who had banished them. 
For years afterwards I would not go to a seance or 
turn a table and would often ask myself what was 
that violent impulse that had run through my 
nerves ? was it a part of myself — something always 
to be a danger perhaps ; or had it come from with- 
out, as it seemed ? 

XXXII 

I had published my first book of poems by sub- 
scription, O'Leary finding many subscribers, and a 
book of stories, when I heard that my grandmother 
was dead and went to Sligo for the funeral. She had 
asked to see me but by some mistake I was not sent 
for. She had heard that I was much about with a 
beautiful, admired woman and feared that I did not 
speak of marriage because I was poor, and wanted 
to say to me "women care nothing about money." 
My grandfather was dying also and only survived 
her a few weeks. I went to see him and wondered at 
his handsome face now sickness had refined it, and 
noticed that he foretold the changes in the weather 
K 129 



by indications of the light and of the temperature 
that could not have told me anything. As I sat 
there my old childish fear returned and I was glad 
to get away. I stayed with my uncle whose house 
was opposite where my grandfather lived, and walk- 
ing home with him one day we met the doctor. 
The doctor said there was no hope and that my 
grandfather should be told, but my uncle would not 
allow it. He said "it would make a man mad to 
know he was dying." In vain the doctor pleaded 
that he had never known a man not made calmer 
by the knowledge. I listened sad and angry, but my 
uncle always took a low view of human nature, his 
very tolerance which was exceedingly great came 
from his hoping nothing of anybody. Before he had 
given way my grandfather lifted up his arms and 
cried out " there she is," and fell backward dead. 
Before he was dead, old servants of that house 
where there had never been noise or disorder began 
their small pilferings, and after his death there was 
a quarrel over the disposition of certain mantle- 
piece ornaments of no value. 

XXXIII 

For some months now I have lived with my own 
youth and childhood, not always writing indeed but 
thinking of it almost every day, and I am sorrowful 

130 



and disturbed. It is not that I have accomplished 
too few of my plans, for I am not ambitious ; but 
when I think of all the books I have read, and of the 
wise words I have heard spoken, and of the anxiety 
I have given to parents and grandparents, and of 
the hopes that I have had, all life weighed in the 
scales of my own life seems to me a preparation for 
something that never happens. 



Printed in the United States of America. 

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